


Two Nights Together

by Aleph (Immatrael), EarthScorpion



Series: Kerisgame extras [6]
Category: Exalted
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, F/F, F/M, Genderqueer Character, Inhuman Biology, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Literal Sex Dreams, Sex Toys, disgustingly cute couples, prehensile hair, relationship drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 10:36:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 35,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20274532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immatrael/pseuds/Aleph, https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthScorpion/pseuds/EarthScorpion
Summary: Motherhood is hard. Motherhood to demon lords who represent aspects of your personality and are also teenagers in all the ways that matter is even harder. And when Haneyl is set off by her older brother Rathan learning sorcery before she could, things head downhill. Can't Keris have one relationship that isn't full of whining, drama and emotional shenanigans?No. No, she can't. She might misuse demonic power to go for a dream booty call with someone she had a fling with a couple of years ago, though.





	1. Chapter 1

Far to the southwest of the Blessed Isle, in the anarchic places which lacked the blessings of civilisation brought by the Realm, lay the island of Shuu Mua. Its volcanic highlands rose high above the sweltering tropical sea that lapped against the marshes and mangrove swamps. In the hills, though, the air was cool enough that mists clung to the bamboo forests and humid jungles, and the sky above was a deep azure. The marks of the chaotic wyld were in the air, adding odd colours to certain vegetation and making animals not quite as they should be.

White birds scattered, cawing.

And in this place a battle was raging. The war had been simmering as nothing but tensions and the promise of violence for days, if not weeks; alternating between heated outrage barely held in check and cold stormfronts of disdain. But now, in extremis, it had finally boiled over.

On one side of the clash was a monstrous demon lord. She was hungry and fanged and wild; a thing that mocked the look of humanity but betrayed her true nature in her slitted eyes and burning crown and the sinful trophies of excess she had draped herself in. Opposing her was her own terrible progenitor; a Hellish princess whose vile ambitions had spread even to desecrating the graves and ruins of the noble Shogunate. Around them stood other blasphemous devils; squabbling and raging over the unearned power that had been claimed by one of their own. It was a battle to be feared, in which righteous men would find no kinship or sympathy for either side. Perhaps the best that could be hoped for was that the infernal creatures would destroy one another, and never again plague the lives of mortals.

It certainly seemed like a possibility, given the words being exchanged.

_“He’s done what?”_ Haneyl shrieked, her hair flaring bright enough to wash the surroundings in toxic green. “That’s impossible!”

“It’s not impossible,” Keris said, already feeling the stress headache coming on.

“Yeah,” Rathan said, glowering at his little sister. Their eyes were on the same level. “I’ve been getting tutoring from mama, same as you.”

“Not the same as me! You don’t show up! You’re too busy with your girlfriend!”

“Haneyl!” Keris snapped. Iris keened, lifting off of Keris's arm to look between mother and daughter.

“Oh, come on, we all know it’s true and that’s what's happening when he’s getting ‘personal tuition’ from Oula!”

Vali shrugged. He was growing like a weed again and so the gesture tore a few seams. “Well, I guess my big bro’s a sorcerer. What does that actually mean? Are you going to be sending him off to be doing,” he flapped his hands vaguely, “sorcerer things?”

Keris smiled tautly at her younger son, glad that he was helping change the topic. “I might. He can be very useful now. So…”

“Oh, so now it’s time for you to favour him even more?” Haneyl snapped. “Exactly what we all needed.”

Calesco rolled her eyes. “I’m not exactly happy with all that power in his hands,” she said, “and no, it doesn’t feel right that Lord Lazy himself gets it. But don’t you think you’re being a big baby?”

“Big baby?” Haneyl screamed, prompting a flinch from Iris. “About the fact that someone who doesn’t even bother to turn up for lessons half the time gets it when I don’t? It’s not fair!” Her teeth were bared and her hair was rising; tongues of viridian fire leaping between the strands as it spread out around her. “It’s not fair it’s not fair _it’s not fair!”_

“Exactly my point.”

“Shut up!” Two rows of crocodilian teeth showed in Haneyl’s mouth as she snapped at her younger sister, and her eyes were furnaces that threw off visible heat shimmers. “Shut _up_, you might not care about this, but I deserved that power! It was _mine!”_ Her voice was deepening; an inhuman snarling reverb, and scales broke through the skin of her arms as she swung them in great, furious gestures before rounding on Rathan.

“You _stole it from me,”_ she accused, smoke coiling hot and acrid from her mouth as she pointed at him, face twisted in bestial rage. _“Thief!”_

“Haneyl,” Keris pleaded, raising her hands to pacify her furious daughter. “He didn’t _steal_ anything; enlightenment isn’t even something you can steal. It’s a personal epiphany; what works for one person wouldn’t work for someone else, anyway. Rathan just realised something that let him move forward, that’s all. You’ll get yours.”

Unfortunately, all her placating words accomplished was to turn the tantrum’s teeth and fire on her instead. “Oh,” Haneyl breathed quietly, fingers that were looking more and more like taloned claws clenching and unclenching as her hair reared out further to halo her in flame. “I see. You _wanted_ this. You _wanted_ Rathan to get it first. That’s why you taught him better than me! You don’t trust me with this power! You’re playing favourites and denying me what’s _mine by right!”_

“Haneyl, no-”

“You did start teaching Oula before any of us, _Keris_,” Zana put in; cutting off Keris’s attempted denial. Haneyl’s head whipped round to her, an inhuman growl reverberating from her that belonged to a much larger creature. Keris gaped at her youngest soul, hardly believing they’d choose _now_ of all times to stoke Haneyl’s temper even higher. “Maybe she was giving Rathan _private lessons_,” Zana continued with a smirk. “So he had an unfair advantage. Poor Hanny didn’t have nothing.”

The enraged shriek from her elder sister said the barb had struck home.

No, no, no, Eko gestured frantically, her mask twisted into an expression of shocked worry. Stop it, stop it everyone, before someone says something they re-

“I _hate_ you!” Haneyl roared, lunging at Rathan.

-gret. Eko's ribbons paled as the words registered, and she gasped silently, hands going to her mask in alarm. Iris keened, fleeing to Calesco.

“Oooh!” Zana leered. “But surely you don’t really mean it, do you Haneyl?” There was a mocking, patronising note to her voice.

“Zana, enough!” Keris ordered, putting herself between Rathan and Haneyl to stall the latter’s feral attempt to hurt her brother. “Haneyl! No! You take that back now, we are _family!”_

For just a moment, as they wrestled - Keris’s steel-hard hair subduing and turning aside Haneyl’s burning locks; slender hands deflecting the wild swipes of bigger, longer claws - Haneyl looked like she was on the verge of going further; saying something truly unforgivable, faintly trembling. Zana opened her mouth; her expression wild and hungry.

Vali’s hand clamped over it.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m all for punching big sis when she’s like this, but if you’re just gonna needle her till she blows up, you’re gonna hurt her feelings and it’s not gonna be fun at all.” He ignored Zana’s indignant squeals and thrashing; not even shifting when she elbowed him in the side with a horn-barbed elbow and bit down on his hand. Hefting her up, he settled her onto his hip without letting go, and began marching away.

“I’m gonna go dunk Zana in the river, mum!” he called back. “Maybe you should do the same to Hanny before she catches fire!”

Yes, Keris decided, her son was probably right. The last thing she needed was a Haneyl tantrum setting the whole camp on fire.

“Shut up, Va- hey! Get off me, mama! What are you doing? Stop… let go! I…”

The plume of steam rose high above the valley, tinged with green.


	2. Chapter 2

Kuha had a small canvas tent set up as her private quarters. She preferred the real world to Kerishyra’s phantom place of eternal sunlight. She had been born in the far North East, and it didn’t feel right to go too long without night.

Plus, Kerishyra got kind of weird about her relationships. A bit of privacy was a good thing.

It wasn’t a particularly spacious tent - there was a camp bed, a travel bundle hanging from a line, and a work table and chair that they’d salvaged from the ruins. Right now Kuha was checking the maps she was making of the area, making sure they were consistent and updating the older ones with newer information.

Kuha was a small woman; slightly shorter than Kerishyra. And the reason for that was that her people had done things to her to keep her small and short so she could ride the fastest owls. A twig-child, they had called her; as small as a young girl, with fragile bones. A woman who had never bled, who was not really a woman and who probably wouldn’t live past twenty. When Kerishyra had come to the far North, she had found Kuha with broken ankles, preparing to do what was expected of a twig-child who couldn’t fly and head to the graveyard of the owls to die and be reborn as a bird. The old men and women had given her to the ally of Testolaghsyra because she had nothing to live for.

Kerishyra had disagreed, and with her demon arts had transformed her into what she was now. Her bones were light, but strong; she was taller and stronger than she had ever been before, and in a sense, she was no longer a woman. She could not bear children, but Kerishyra had rebuilt her so she could help a man and a woman have a child like her.

And those had just been the first changes to her body she had accepted in Kerishyra’s service. She had been reshaped and remoulded many times. Her time as a demonhost for Calescohyra had given her feathered wings that hid under her skin when she was not using them; Zanahyra had given her an owl tattoo that spread itself across her lower back; Haneylhyra had done so many wonderful things to her. All the demonic power she had taken in had made her like the priests of her people, able to see the hidden spirits of the world. And she had been taught the demon arts.

Her people would have called her a demon-witch, and Kuha bore that title with pride. She was a witch; a lover of demons, and it was wonderful.

People had been shouting outside, but Kuha hadn’t been paying too much attention to it. She did pay attention when someone stepped into her tent, bringing with them a familiar scent.

Big, warm arms wrapped themselves around her. A damp woman’s body pressed itself up against her upper back. “Hey, lovely,” Haneyl whispered into her ear.

Kuha smiled, exhaling as she sank into the warmer-than-human hug. Her flight-friend’s scent filled her nostrils; flowers, woodsmoke, cooked meat and under it all; the smell of an eager woman. “Hey, Haneylhyra,” she said, tilting her head back to meet green eyes and rest her head on the other woman’s breasts.

Haneyl was flushed, and the glow of her eyes flickered like her flames. Her pupils didn’t seem to decide what shape they wanted to be; human-round, or something more slitted. She was steaming, both metaphorically and literally as her clothes dried out from the inside-out. She trembled faintly up against Kuha. She must be eager. Or angry. Probably angry. “What are you up to?”

Kuha gestured to the table. “Mapping.”

“Oh. I see.” A pause. “Let’s fuck.”

“Sorry… excuse me?”

“I’m bored. Let’s fuck.”

Well, she wasn’t exactly having the most thrilling time reconciling maps. “This evening?”

“Now.”

Kuha blinked. The sounds of the camp outside were easily audible, barely muffled by the cloth walls. “Won’t they hear?” 

“So?” Haneyl took a deep breath. “I want you. I’m bored and horny. And mama is being a bitch. If anyone hears us… well, that’s their problem. Everyone knows what we do.” Her warm hands massaged Kuha’s shoulders. “Please say yes,” she breathed.

Kuha considered it, though not for very long. “Okay! Just… just make sure the tent’s closed.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Haneyl went to make sure it was buttoned shut, her skirt flicking around her.

“You… uh.” Kuha considered how to phrase it without winding her up further. “You sound annoyed.”

“You know how mama’s being a bitch? Because she is! She’s treating me like crap and spoiling Rathan. She just dumped me in the river for no reason. I don’t want to talk about it.” Haneyl growled at the back of her throat, a deep rumbling bass sound like a far off avalanche. The heat in the tent spiked. “Well, fuck that. So let’s fuck until I feel better.”

“Oh.” Kuha smiled. The sex when Haneylhyra was venting frustations was often the best. “Well, come on, babe. Let’s get rid of those worries.”

Big arms lifted her up out of her seat, turning her around with ease as she sat her on the table. Kuha’s bones were light and she was small, and Haneylhyra was so strong, so… physical. It just did it for her. Haneyl pushed her lips up against Kuha, sweet-tasting tongue exploring her mouth, while her fingers ventured down into Kuha’s shorts. She gasped as Haneyl slipped into her underwear, teasing her hair before stroking up against her labia.

“You like that, don’t you,” Haneyl murmured, as she paused for breath. The palm of her hand ground into Kuha’s vulva, rubbing with just enough pressure to feel good, but not quite so much that she didn’t want more.

“Mmm...” Yes, she very much did. She was getting wet. Kuha let out a breathy squeak, blushing from the sounds that were coming from her as she rubbed back against the hand.

“You like that too,” Haneyl purred, leaning in to kiss her.

“Yeah!” Kuha gasped. She squealed as Haneyl slipped a finger inside, and broke into nervous giggles. She thought she heard someone just outside - but right now she didn’t care. Especially not when Haneylhyra was kissing her again; her fingers moving like they didn’t have bones.

It was wrong to compare Haneylhyra to her younger sister, but in the privacy of her own head Kuha sometimes did it anyway. Calescohyra had been all about feelings and emotions. The actual lovemaking had been less important. And when it had happened, it had been slow and sticky, like warm honey. She’d enveloped her, mouth never leaving her skin, rubbing up against her in slow, languous gestures. Sometimes she'd slip inside Kuha's skin, possessing her and the two of them would share every sensation.

By contrast, Haneylhyra was like riding a half-tamed war owl. You held on with your knees, and knew this wasn’t going to end until she got tired. And no matter what you did, there was going to be screaming and you were going to get bitten.

She withdrew her hand, and Kuha moaned at the loss of feeling. Then came a ripping sound, as Haneyl tore the clothes from her lower half. The air was cold on her exposed parts, and Kuha squeaked. 

“Haneyhyra!”

“What? I’ll fix them later,” Haneyl said, tossing the ruined garments aside. They hit the tent walls, and slid down. 

“You don’t have to tear my clothes off me every time.”

“I do this time.” She kissed her, tongue slipping in. Kuha surrendered to her warmth.

“Well, okay…” she mumbled, taking in the desire in her lover’s eyes. Haneyl’s fingers twined into her trimmed auburn hair, tickling her and Kuha squirmed. “Hee… no, no, stop teasing…”

Haneyl grinned, and licked her fingers clean. “You taste good,” she said, a fire in her voice. Leaning in, she kissed Kuha again, with a mouth that had a new taste. 

Kuha swallowed, feeling the pulse in her groin as she inhaled Haneyl’s smoky scent. She wanted that mouth on her. Her throat felt parched. “Haneylhyra, please,” she begged.

“Please what?” More fabric tore as Haneyl ripped away Kuha’s smock. 

It left her in only her breastband, and Kuha shrugged it off before Haneyl could tear that too. “Please eat me!” she begged.

It was the right thing to say to those bright green eyes which were devouring her naked body. “I love it when you talk dirty,” Haneyl purred. “But you don’t get to tell me what to do. So I’m not going to. I'm going to give you what you need, not what you think you want.”

Kuha whimpered as Haneyl started to massage her breasts. The hands were almost too hot to bear, like the warm rocks they used in massage parlours. She wrapped her legs around her lover, the bare skin of her knees rubbing up against the silk of the other woman’s clothes. Haneyl worked circles around her breasts as her heat sank deep into Kuha’s muscles, spiralling in towards her nipples. She tweaked them, rolled them between her fingers, then pinched.

“Too hard?” Haneyl checked when Kuha gasped.

“J-just a surprise,” she stammered, breathing heavily. “I’d have worn my piercings for you, but you showed up without warning and… oooh!” 

Haneyl lifted her legs until she was flat on her back on the table. She kissed her way around Kuha’s ankles, soft lips against the flowing tattoo-oaths of loyalty to Kerishyra. Kuha broke into giggles at the sensation; her knees pushed into her chest by Haneyl’s weight. 

“Aren’t you going to bring that girl-dick out to play?” Haneyl murmured, brushing around her clit. “I want it in me.”

She squeaked as Haneyl’s fingers once again rubbed against her lower lips, branching into finer roots to massage and coax her. It was hard to think when Haneyl was fingering her - and hard to say no when she knew how good it felt. One of the demon arts she had learned was to reshape her own flesh with clay and ink. Haneyl liked it a lot when she drew her clit out into something that she could suck like a man’s dick - almost as much as she liked watching Kuha take others with it. Especially men. Unlike her younger sister, Haneyl got off on penetration and didn’t much care who was giving and who was taking.

“It’d take too long for that. I don’t feel like it right now.”

“Your loss.” Haneyl pushed her groin into Kuha’s naked vulva, still holding her legs in the air. “It’d feel good…”

The cloth of Haneyl’s skirt rubbed against Kuha’s lips, spreading wetness which stained the silk. She ached, wanting to fuck and be fucked. “It does,” she murmured. 

Haneyl stuck her hand between the two of them, using her pelvis to push her fingers into Kuha, who moaned. When she pushed, the fingers went deeper; when she pulled back, she let them slip out again. Her thumb brushed against Kuha's most sensitive nub again and again. Wet sounds filled the air, joined by moans and Haneyl’s grunts. “So are you going to do this to me, babe?” she asked, as Kuha clenched down on her.

“Uh… uh… maybe later.” Kuha spread her legs, wrapping them around her Haneylhyra’s bare back. Now she was helping with each thrust, pushing the fingers deeper. “But,” she whispered breathily, “I like it more with your tongue.”

“Oh?”

“It makes me feel like I’m yours when you take me.”

Haneyl’s eyes lit up at that. “Yes. You’re mine.” That got her a deep kiss, and Haneyl’s fingers hooked up into her pussy. Kuha gasped, heart racing from the deep heat, and her legs went limp.

Biting her lip, Haneyl dipped down to the smaller woman’s chest. She sucked hard on Kuha’s left nipple, then trailed her tongue across to her right. Her flesh squirmed, but Haneyl had already moved up to her neck, kissing her away around it with love-bites.

“Mmm… mmm.” Her cunt throbbed as Haneyl slipped her fingers out, offering them up to Kuha for her to lick. She tasted herself, tangy and slightly bitter, and kissed down the demon’s fingers to the knuckles. 

“You taste good,” Haneyl whispered, licking Kuha’s lips clean.

Kuha nuzzled Haneyl’s neck, inhaling her scent of jungles and burning and the sweaty tang of a horny woman. “I love the way you smell, Haneylhyra.”

“I know,” Haneyl said. She sank down, lips dancing lower to Kuha’s navel - and then even lower. Kuha gasped, groaning her name as she licked around her inner thigh. Her nipples were still tingling. Something squirmed on her skin, and she felt it as Haneyl’s saliva sprouted into bright-coloured flowers that formed a necklace. 

“Sky-gods!”

Haneyl pulled her back up to a sitting position, running her hands up and down her back, and kissed her. Kuha let out a high pitched trembling whine when her nipples brushed against the silk of Haneyl’s top. “Sounds like you’re having fun,” Haneyl said. 

“Yes!” Kuha moaned. “More! Please!”

“Ha! I knew I’d give you what you needed. No matter how much my bitchy mother kicks up a fuss,” Haneyl said, brow furrowing. “And let me tell you…”

“Suck them,” Kuha begged. Not just because she needed the sensation, needed the touch. Because she didn’t want to get involved in family arguments again. Haneylhyra had better things to do with her mouth.

The feeling of Haneyl’s lips and tongue on her had her yelping, almost flopping back as two then three fingers slid into her. “You’re so good,” she gasped, over the sound of wet flesh against flesh. She felt so warm and soft and loved.

“Mmm.” Haneyl lifted her lips from one nipple, then gave the other a playful lick. Kuha groaned, deep in the back of her throat as Haneyl’s thumb rubbed up against her clitoris. She leaned up for a kiss. “I’m the best.”

“Finish me,” Kuha breathed, voice cracking. “Please please please!”

“Are you begging?”

Kuha swore at her in her native language. “Of course I’m begging.”

Haneyl wrapped her up in her arms, lifting her up and carrying her over to the camp bed. Kuha sank into the warm, smoky-smelling embrace, slipping her fingers under Haneyl’s top to feel the curve of her breasts.

“You’re just as eager as me.”

“Of course I am,” Kuha said, giving Haneyl’s bare arm a playful nip. “It’s not as comfy as your room at home, but it’ll do.” 

She laid Kuha down onto her thin mattress, posing her with her legs spread. Kuha moaned as Haneyl ran her bare feet over her vulva - then gasped as her big toe penetrated her.

“Look at you. Already groaning for me.” She lifted her foot back, spreading her toes to let Kuha see the strands of liquid. “Do you want to suck it clean?”

“I… ah!” Kuha gasped as the foot continued its stroking. There was something unquestionably hot about lying here, naked and panting, while Haneyl did what she wanted. She ground against the toe, feeling it spread her, letting it slickly slide against her slit. “I… I…”

With a smooth motion, Haneyl’s foot was on her chest, holding her down on the bed. Daintily, Haneyl offered it to Kuha. This close, Kuha could see the grey hairs growing from her tanned legs. She raised her trembling hands, caressing the curves of the demon’s legs, feeling muscles flex below the surface of the skin. There was something hard below the surface of her skin - scales, perhaps?

It didn’t matter, as Kuha kissed her foot. She took her big toe into her mouth, running her tongue around it as she tasted herself. And she must have done a good job, because Haneyl had to spread her hair to keep her balance on one foot.

“That’s it,” Haneyl said. “Aren’t you good with your tongue?”

“I am,” Kuha agreed. “Want me to show you?”

Haneyl shucked her skirt, tossing it onto Kuha’s face who batted it away with a giggle. She had clinging green silk underwear on underneath, with a wet stain over the crotch. “You may see to your princess,” she said archly.

Kuha knew what to do. She sat up, and pulled down Haneyl’s panties. 

Her bush was untrimmed, grown out since the last time Kuha had seen it. More green jade gleamed on her clitoral hood. Kuha kissed her inner thighs, lavishing attention on the pale, untanned flesh she’d revealed and brushing her cheeks against her hairy, wet mound. With a happy sigh, Haneyl stepped out of the thin fabric, pushing Kuha down again with the foot she’d kissed.

“Do you know what’s coming next?” Haneyl whispered.

Kuha’s mouth watered. “You are, my princess,” she said wickedly, hands creeping down to finger herself. There was something so… so fulfilling about this. All of this. And particularly the happy beam that produced on Haneylhyra’s face. A demon this powerful, part of Kerishyra, was so turned on by her.

“Yes. And then you are. I’m going to make you scream,” Haneyl said. “That’s a promise.”

Kneeling over Kuha, she lowered her mound onto her face, until it filled her world. Overcome, Kuha leaned in, tasting and smelling the musk of a demon lord. Tentatively, she licked the flat of her tongue against Haneylhyra’s hot, wet pussy. Haneyl moaned, so she did it again.

Gods, knowing that someone so powerful and beautiful was in this state because of her was… well, it was only making her wetter. 

“Yes, yes,” Haneyl gasped. “You’re wonderful. Eat me.”

Kuha gripped her bottom, cupping her curves. The taller woman groaned as Kuha nibbled her inner lips, worshipped her clitoris, gave adoration at the secret temple of the Flower Maiden. Her tangy, slightly bitter juices coated her face. As Haneyl ground against her face her nose rubbed in between the demoness’s labia. Kuha’s middle finger was in between her own lips, slick and slopping wet as she humped her hand. She needed it. She needed it!

Lifting her head, she sucked on the jade piercing, tugged it between her teeth. Haneyl let out a long, thin whine and sagged back.

She slipped her tongue into the hot folds, parting them and wiggling around inside. Haneyl’s moans of pleasure fed her determination to work harder. Her lover shifted, leaning forwards on her arms. Her pussy was Kuha’s world, framed by her thighs; her scent and taste was overwhelming.

“You’re so good at this,” Haneyl gasped, as Kuha teased the green jade piercing on her hood. “I wanna see you eat out Elly.”

Kuha could have said something about the practice her and the other demoness had been getting, but instead she licked Haneyl’s pussy from top to bottom, peeling back her hood with her tongue and lingering on it. The chorus of moans and squeaks drove her on. The little red nub throbbed under her ministrations, and her thighs squeezed the side of her head. 

When Haneyl came, she wailed out her pleasure, flopping forwards with great heaving gasps. She ground her twitching pussy into her lover’s face with each wail. Kuha almost thought she might be faking it; Haneylhyra wasn’t a screamer. This was the kind of thing a neomah who was overperforming for a client would do.

But no, this was real. Kuha could taste the difference, as she eagerly licked it up the literal nectar of a demoness. The reward for bringing Haneyl to her climax was one of the most delicious things she knew and each taste only built her desire. Her tongue worshipped the red lips, licking the liquid from where it clung to the hair and diving into the depths to lap it up like a cat with a bowl of cream.

Finally Hanyel relaxed, and with a gasping sigh slid back. Kuha gasped for air as she fingered herself. 

“That was good,” Haneyl said. She leaned forward to kiss Kuha deeply, rubbing the sweat-soaked cloth of her top against her skin. Her hand, though, pulled Kuha’s out from between her legs. “But don’t finish yourself yet.” 

Kuha could only whine, tongue twitching around Haneyl’s. Her mind was blurred with pink ecstasy. She bucked her hips, grinding against her leg.

“We are going to have so much fun,” Haneyl breathed. “For that, you deserve the best.”

“Fuck me, please, fuck me!” Kuha begged. She felt like she was burning up inside; like there was a fire in her core that would devour her whole if she didn’t do what it wanted. It ate away at her reason, and turned her thoughts onto ash on the wind. She could feel herself oozing down curve of her leg and the sensation against her skin just built and built. Her nipples were throbbing; she couldn’t breathe through her nose; her groin ached because there was nothing in there why wasn’t there something in there.

“You’re so sexy when you’re like this,” Haneyl whispered. “You can feel it, can’t you?”

“I need it!”

“It’s what it feels like to be me when you’re so fucking hot. So I’m going to give it to you. Because you’re mine.”

Haneyl undid the ties of her ao yem, and tossed it aside. She knelt bare-breasted before Kuha, her tan-lines clear to see. Under the backless top, she was much paler. The green jade piercings extended below the neck; dragon-headed bars pierced her swollen nipples and a coiling icon of Sextes Jylis rested at her naval. On her breastbone, she’d tattooed a green shape that could have been a seven-rayed sun or a flower. Leaning over her, she brushed her breasts against Kuha’s face.

Parting her lips, Kuha took one of the hot nipples into her mouth, inhaling as she did. She began to suckle, drawing pleased murmurs from Haneyl’s lips. The taste of salt and honey was strong.

“Oh, that’s it.” Haneyl let out a moan, and slipped her fingers up into Kuha, spreading her. Once again those inhuman fingers were spreading her, writhing over her clitoris, playing with her lips and curled up deep into her core. Kuha clenched around the invaders, already so close, feeling her lover shiver. Haneylhyra’s taste was more than sight and as she suckled on that nipple - teasing it, tugging it, trapping the jade between her teeth only to bite down on the flesh behind - the demoness rewarded her pussy. Playing her flesh, shaping her responses, cultivating her desire until the fire grew within her and blossomed.

“Come for me!” Haneyl called out, raising her voice as she pinched down on Kuha’s clit.

“Haneyl!” Kuha howled, digging her fingers into her back. The pollen was in her breath, in the sweat sticking to her, and in the gush of sexual fluids that dripped down her thighs and coated Haneyl’s tongue. Her inner walls clenched around the intruder, and the muscles in her thighs spasmed. 

“How was that?” Haneyl asked, making a show of licking her brassy-coated fingers clean. Around her, brightly coloured blossoms were growing from where their sweat had mixed.

Kuha gasped. “Wonderful,” she breathed, looking up at her lover through heavy-lidded eyes.

It wasn’t the end. Haneylhyra had only come once. They wouldn’t be done soon.


	3. Chapter 3

The moans had started up again. They were loud enough that Keris could hear them even through the harp music the pouting Nara plucked from the strands of Time.

Keris crumpled her hair into her ears, and tried to focus on giving the twins a bath on the far side of the camp. They’d managed to get into the flour supplies again, and Kali was as white as Ogin. They needed to be washed, but it also meant she had them close to hand where two very curious and mobile toddlers couldn’t escape to see what all the noises were.

The moans, the groans, the wet sound of flesh, and above all the gasps of “Fuck me!”.

This was something her daughter was doing to get back at her. Keris was sure of this. Haneyl knew just how sensitive her mother’s hearing was, so she’d gone into Kuha’s tent specifically to have noisy sex with her. Knowing that Keris would hear it. Knowing that without wanting to, her mind’s eye would construct

_Kuha squeaked, wrapping her legs around Haneyl’s thigh and grinding her wet pussy against the bare skin while the two women kissed, four hands groping sweat-slick skin_

a blow-by-blow account.

It wasn’t that… it was natural for… a healthy young woman was allowed to… look, there wasn’t anything Keris had heard that she hadn’t done with Sasi. But her daughter was a spoiled brat who was using her sexuality - and her sex - as a weapon to piss off her mother! And Keris was pissed off! Rightly so! Because that brat was making her listen to her as she fucked!

Nara’s music took on a minor key, and Ogin giggled as Keris tried to clean the floury paste off his tummy. What had those two gotten into? It was sticking much more than flour should! Iris hadn't been watching her because she was so upset by the fight that she had huddled up to the safely-napping Aiko. At least she was out of the way.

“Ogin, moonbeam, please tell mama what else you were playing in,” she said.

“Just flour!” Ogin sing-sang.

“And flowers!” Kali contributed, splashing her.

They weren’t going to be any help. They thought it was funny.

And it wasn’t just her that had to listen to Haneyl and her very vocal love for being eaten out, she continued in her silent rant. Anyone else with ears! Canvas walls did nothing to keep the louder noises in. It was one thing if she’d just been getting back at Keris - an awful thing - but Asarin had nearly stormed in there and it had been clear that only the thought of what she would see had put her off. Bright red and hair burning, she’d marched off into the jungle to get away from the noise.

“Oh, there you are!” Calesco called up, stomping up. Eko lingered behind her, hands over her ears. “Are you going to stop her? Gag her?”

This is just the worst, Eko indicated with an angry kick to the ground. She didn’t want to have the knowledge of her little sister’s incurable l-l-lewdness forced on her! To think that Calesco’s friend Kuha is getting up to such disgusting things with her pervert of a sister! She used to be so innocent and pure! Eko had to get out of here!

Calesco opened her mouth, cheeks blushing. “Yes, she was… she was just a friend,” she tried. “But I don’t want to hear this! She gets this from Sasi! You know that! The side of things that the disgusting tarry harlot represents!”

Nara’s hands danced over the air, which shimmered as he pulled and tugged at it to bring forth music. “Anyone’s got a right to put on a show,” he informed the older two, mischief in his four eyes.

Cheeks red, Keris turned her attention to her youngest soul. “None of that from you, young man,” she snapped. “You just need to play music loudly and not think at all about what your big sister is doing!” She looked around. “Have you seen Vali or Rathan?”

“Vali followed Asarin out,” Calesco said. “Rathan?”

Eko stuck her hand up. Oh, oh, she waved, Rathan’s down by the river, sulking because Haneyl the mean perverted bully hurt his feelings! Eko would be there with him being the best big sister and helping him cheer up, but Oula’s probably going to show up there and that means Eko can’t escape the lewds! It’s disgusting! Why is her family so full of stupid perverts? Apart from her innocent pure baby sister, of course!

Calesco’s blush deepened. “If… uh, if you make her behave and shut up, we can take the twins up to the hot springs I found up the mountain,” she said, glancing up the slopes. “That’ll get us away from her, and,” she smiled down at them, “I think maybe the warm mineral water will help get them clean.”

“Hot bath Cally!” Kali cheered, clearly looking forward to getting to swim around properly. She blew a kiss at her big sister. "Gin! We're going to hot baths."

Ogin considered this, and nodded cheerfully. “Yay,” he observed.

“I’ll... do what I can,” Keris sighed. “But no promises. Good idea, either way.”

Of course, it wasn’t so easy to just transfer two sticky toddlers into the hands of their elder sisters, but once Keris had provisioned the girls with all the things they needed to look after the babies, she watched them go with a sigh of relief. Mostly because that was one worry she didn’t have, but also because there was a little bit of her that was glad she didn’t have to try to scrub off that glue-like flour mix.

“Do I need to keep on playing music?” Nara enquired, plucking out a lilting theme.

“Yes!”

“Urgh! I know Hanny and Kuha are getting kissy!”

Keris twitched as a particularly loud gasp told her where Haneyl had just stuck a finger. “That’s not all they’re doing, so you are going to wait until you’re older, young man.”

“Young man? Hmm. I could be a her-us! Would you tell us then?”

“No! Then I’d just tell you you had to wait until you’re older, young lady!”

Nara blew a raspberry. “You’re no fun! Hmmph! Kuha sounded like she was having fun before you pulled me-her away from the tent! She was giggling!”

Keris’s cheeks were blazing red. “Eko!” she called out. “I need you right now!”

Her daughter stepped out from behind her, ribbons still as red as her mother's face. This better be good, mama, she indicated, her mask changing expressions to a pout. She was getting away from this lewd place.

“Yes! You need to! And also take Zanara away, so they don’t get curious!” Keris’s finger danced between Nara and the Zana-statue sitting beside him. “Both of them!”

“Oh, come on, mama, that’s…” But what Zanara had been about to say was lost in the Doppler shift as Eko lifted both of them over her shoulders and sprinted off after Calesco’s dark-winged shape in the sky.

With a sigh of relief, Keris started to clean up after the babies’ bath. That was one load off her back, at least.

Now, to make sure Rathan was fine or talk to Haneyl first?


	4. Chapter 4

The demon lord Rathan sat by the river, feet dangling in the waters. He leant against a great two-handed sword made from moonsilver that had been thrust into the ground. Although it was the silver of the wrong moon, which was to say, the moon that was a faint shape in the afternoon sky rather than him.

No one knew his suffering. Oh, the burdens of the world were heaped on him, as a boy with too many sisters. One of them was always acting up. Or more than one. Usually most of them. There was nothing in all the realms as cruel as a sister who had decided to make your life a misery. Regardless, what he meant was that he’d just managed something amazing and fantastic and brilliant, and realised that there was a whole world of wonderful things he didn’t know out there. And what did he get? His fair share of applause and admiration? No, he got treated like he hadn’t earned it! And screamed at by Haneyl!

Why did she have to go ruin it? 

Haneyl had hated him. Not just resented him, not just taken his obvious victory as fuel to push on. She’d hated him. Hated him so much that she’d wanted him… gone. 

It hurt. It hurt when people didn’t like you, but it was worst when it was family. He wiped his pearly eyes on a lock of scarlet hair, and heaved a sigh, gazing around the valley.

If it wasn’t for Haneyl, this would be a nice place. The temperature here was so much better than muggy, sweltering Saata. His lands were a place of snow and icy waters. He wasn’t born for such sustained heat as that low-lying city. But here, higher up, it was nice. The streams were fed by snowmelt, and it felt wonderful to stick your feet in them. Well, as long as you checked they weren’t one of the ones too chaos-tainted where you’d risk the things you pulled out not being your feet. Maybe someone else's, but not yours.

But those streams tended to be more multi-coloured, and be surrounded by weird anomalies born of the madness outside the world. He sniffed. Proper worlds were bordered by a giant feathered snake living in fog rather than soul-eating chaos-princes dwelling in raw madness anyway.

The point was. The point was. This would be a nice place, if it wasn’t for the ravening chaos princes and wyld beasties. And also Haneyl.

Urgh, what was up with her? Why was she being such a bitch, even by her standards? And why was she being so embarrassing as to do _that_ in the middle of camp in the middle of the day and not even try to keep the noise down? Didn’t she care how people were hearing her?

A lesser man would have blamed it on her being on her period. But Rathan, wise in the way of sisters, knew well that they didn’t need such an excuse to ruin things.

Something moved in the undergrowth behind him, and Rathan half-turned, a faint reddish halo wrapping him. He relaxed when he saw who it was. His girlfriend Oula picked her way through the young bamboo sprouts, using her black lightning sword as a machete. She held it very professionally. For all that her demon breed wasn’t - theoretically - a violent one, Oula didn’t really hold in things telling her what to do. Including her own nature. He was her boyfriend and she loved him and she still didn’t do what he said if she felt it was stupid. And she’d be pretty vocal about that.

Which was really cute of her but also sometimes pretty annoying. Rathan sort of felt that Mama was a bad influence on her.

“There was a path, Oulie,” he called out.

“Yes, but that wasn’t a straight line,” she said, with a flick of her waist-length pink hair, streaked with metallic silver. Her knee-high boots like the pirates wore crunched on the undergrowth. She wore a short silk scarlet qipao, but practical canvas shorts emerged from underneath it. “I heard you had a fight and Haneyl was being just awful, so I had to get to you as fast as possible.” She paused. “Well, fast as practical. I didn’t want to leave everything behind and just return to my heart. Though maybe you’d have cheered up more if I’d appeared here naked apart from my sword. I can still do that if you want!”

“I just… needed some time alone,” Rathan said, with a sigh.

“Well, you can be alone with me.” She sheathed her sword, heading over. The sunlight caught her silver horns, shimmering over the surface of the unmelting ice that coated the mercury. “I’m not going to let you brood and talk yourself into thinking that no one loves you when I’m here.”

“I should have known I couldn’t get away from everyone.”

“Of course I found you,” Oula said, daintily sitting down beside him and resting her head against his shoulder. Her silver pupils were little hearts as she met his gaze. “I’ll always find you. Because I love you. Even if you want to hide away, I know where you are.”

“Mmm.” She had no pulse - but then again, she never did. Her heart was in the little box he always kept with him.

“I mean it!” Oula squeezed his arm. “I’ll kill anyone who tries to keep me away from you.”

“You’re just being romantic,” he said, shaking his head.

“... well, at least I’ll really whine to Aunty Keris if she drags me off on a long trip and I can’t see you once in a while! Like that trip to Ca Map!”

Rathan grinned goofily. A scared and nervous Oula had appeared in his bed having been dragged by Mama on breaking into an embassy of the Dead, and while she’d been really brave about it, she’d needed a good amount of comforting. “Aww.” His hair squeezed her, hands behind his neck as he stared up at the blue sky. “Love you.”

She shivered pleasurably. “I love you too,” she whispered, her heart-shaped pupils glowing pink-red for a moment.

“Oh, by the way, Oulie, the water’s nice and cool.”

“Oh!” She tugged off her leather boots, wagging her toes. The sun gleamed off her red-pearl nails. “Yes, that’s nice. Her gaze drifted south, down to his crotch and she took his hand. “So what happened?”

He provided an abbreviated explanation while she listened. “I just… it was so cruel. And hurtful. And now she’s… she’s just flaunting that,” Rathan’s cheeks blushed, “... her and Kuha. I just… we were getting along mostly fine on the trip in the South. But she started acting up towards the end, and she’s just been getting worse and worse.”

“But that’s because Kuha is a disgusting adulteress who cheats on someone who loves her, and your sister is a slut,” Oula pointed out calmly. “That’s how I expect them to act.”

Rathan shifted uncomfortably, because while Oulie wasn’t exactly wrong, it wasn’t nice to just go and say it out loud. He had no fondness for Kuha, who had broken Calesco’s heart, but he’d punch someone who called one of his sisters a slut if they weren’t part of his family. Even if in Haneyl’s case, it was true.

“I mean, yes, it could just be that Haneyl is being a bitch because she hates anyone else beating her at anything,” he mumbled.

“There we go. It’s closed. And that means that there’s no need for you to sulk. It’s just how she is.”

“But…”

“But?”

“Well.” Rathan kicked the water. “I mean, it’s the easy answer.”

“Maybe the easy answer is the right one.” Oula leaned up against him, pressing her breasts into his arm. “So you just need to cheer up. I can help that.”

“I mean, sometimes.” He frowned, trying to put things together. “But taking the easy answer is… lazy. No, there’s some things which don’t line up.”

“Oh.” She nuzzled him with her cheek, sneakily pulling his robe open. “Like what?”

“Just… some of the emotional things that came out. And I just… it’s just…” Rathan stared at a fish in the water, fighting for the right words. And trying to put aside the growing feelings that Oula was stirring in him. Feelings weren’t the only things that were growing, either.

“I think she just upset you, and because despite how she is, you love your sister. So you’re trying to rationalise it. But she’s really bratty, and that’s how she gets things off people.” Oula cupped his loincloth. The thin fabric was the only thing between her hand and his balls as she started to gently massage them.

“No, no, it’s…” He clenched his fist. There was something nearly in reach. “She didn’t look like herself. Her pupils are normally round. And her face wasn’t shaped quite right.”

“She’s a shapeshifter. She does that. And besides,” Oula cooed. She slipped a delicate hand into his underwear, stroking his half-hard dick until it twitched in her grip. She grinned when she saw Rathan bite his lip. “You don’t need to think about what your slutty sister is up to. Not when you have me. You only need me.” Her other hand started to work at his belt. 

“Oulie, I’m serious. It’s… it’s… it’s…” That was it, Rathan realised. Haneyl wasn’t acting entirely like Haneyl. Like, it was still Haneyl, but there was a deliberate cruelty to how she was being that was new. He didn’t have the words for it, but there was a difference between… between wanting to be the best because his baby sister had a raging inferiority complex, and hating anyone who dared to beat her at anything. Not just hating. Wanting to destroy. There was something cold in the heart of the fire, something…

Rathan completely forgot where he was going with this as Oula lowered her mouth over his dick, dipping down until her lips met the top of her hand. He let out a gasp.

“I’m cheering you up! Don’t you dare think about her!” she said when she came up for air. Her soft tongue licked around his head, while her mass of pink hair stroked his stomach, thighs and balls. He groaned, and he could feel Oula smile from how her muscles tightened around him.

“Oulie, there’s no way I’m thinking about my sister when you have my dick in your mouth,” he murmured, massaging the swell of her breasts through her silk dress. “That’d be weird.”

She rose back up, eyes adoring. “That’s what I want,” she said, giving his cockhead a kiss. Her lips wrapped around the tip again, and she pumped him with her hand, before pulling back his foreskin entirely. The slick warmth of her mouth lavished attention on his most sensitive place, tongue running around the rim and flicking over the tiny slit on top. Rathan twitched involuntarily, breath hitching.

“Oh!” he gasped. “Oulie, I’m…”

Oula straightened up, adjusting her hair back with a ladylike flip. His dick twitched, denied the sensation. Her expression was calm - at least if you couldn’t read the arch little smirk that made itself known at the corners of her eyes and the quirk of her lips. “Just getting you ready,” she said. “I wanted you thinking of me. Only of me.”

Rathan leaned in to kiss red-coral lips. “No one is like you,” he breathed. “You got me so hard.”

She shivered pleasurably. “Now, I’m going to further your lessons in sorcery.” 

That was such a change of topic that Rathan blinked. “Uh. You are, Oulie?”

“Oh yes! There are certain ways to gather power and share and transfer it! But for now, I propose the Rite of Kash-Andu, to bring bliss and the favour of the Yozis!”

He blinked. “I’ve read about that. Don’t we need demonic temples and unholy icons and offerings and…” 

“Oh, don’t worry, as the experienced sorceress here, I can tell you that we’ve got all the necessary things for a great and potent magic!” she told him confidently. “One that even a newcomer like you can practice.”

“Oh?” He grinned. “I offer myself to your superior knowledge.”

“Of course you do, my student.” She raised one brow archly. “Of course, you were mine already, so you didn’t need to do that.”

“So, what books are you going to have me read?”

“No books. No books at all, student.” Oula leaned back, wriggling as she pulled at the shorts she was wearing under her short dress. Rathan grabbed one of her smooth legs, kissing from her knee to her toes and pulling giggles from her lips. He could feel the tiny shuddering of the box he kept her heart in, as it pounded with excitement. With a kick, she sent the shorts flying, revealing her skimpy pink silk underwear.

“Behold! The gate to this demonic temple is barred by a mystical barrier!” she said, straddling his lap. 

“Ah yes, the work of demonic weavers,” he said. He rolled up her dress to her waist for her, fingers working at the side-ties of her panties. 

“Exactly!” Oula ground against his dick, thin silk the only thing between them as her fingers frantically worked at the button ties at her neck. “Only the chosen one may enter.” She leaned her brow against his, their horns brushing against each other as she pulled off her dress. “And I chose you, the day I became a woman.” 

Rathan slipped his robe off his shoulders as he worked at the bows. “You took your Maiden’s Tea this morning?” he murmured as her hands brushed his smooth chest. Neither of them had any hair below the neck - but that was to be expected from water demons. 

“Like I’d forget. Aunty Keris’d send me home if she thought I could get pregnant. And then we couldn’t do this.” She glanced down at where his fingers were still working at the bows. “Does the supplicant struggle with his task?” She wasn’t making things easier as her hips kept moving, distracting him with the silk that brushed against his length.

“No… oh, there…” He had her underwear off, tossing it aside. His fingers teased her smooth slit, and felt how wet she was. She shivered with a gasp as he rubbed his fingers between her folds. The only thing she had on was her backless silk undershirt, and her nipples tented the thin fabric that slid against his hairless chest. 

“Hark! The gate is open! The altar awaits the supplicant!” Oula moaned. Rathan kissed the red moon and wave tattoos on her exposed shoulders and arms. 

“So beautiful,” he mumurmed, nipping her neck. Every time he saw them, he was reminded of the pain she had willingly gone through so everyone could see she was his. The thought only made him harder and his dick brushed her thigh. 

In one single flexible motion, she pulled off her silk undershirt, leaving her fully naked on his lap. Her hard nipples brushed against his chest; the shell-like bands of cream and tan that fanned out from her spine were tinged with a pink blush. The full crimson and silver glory of her tattoos, made by the demon princess Lilunu, were now in view. As she moved, the images under her skin seemed to shift too.

“Do you want me to offer prayers at your temple?” he teased. He brushed her clit with one hand while his other cupped a breast. She gasped, pressing into him. “I could… uh, polish the altar until it shines.” 

“Shh! The supplicant should not deviate from the ritual!” She adjusted his dick with a delicate hand, until the head pushed between her lips. She shifted back and forth, teasing him. “The supplicant brings the unholy icon…”

“Hey, who are you calling unho-oh!”

She kissed him as she sank down, her pussy velvet-soft. He let out a soft groan at the feeling of her wrapping around him. She bottomed out, his hairless balls pressed up against her bare labia, then started to rise up again. The box with her heart in was pounding as loud as his own heart in his ears. “Listen to your teacher,” Oula whispered, arms wrapped around his neck. His long red hair intertwined with hers as their bodies slid over one another. She smelled of perfume, and under that, the deep sea. “You’ve just conveyed your unholy icon into my demonic temple. Now, complete the ritual! Give me your offerings!”

Rathan couldn’t help but snigger, his body shaking. His bouncing motion drew happy squeals from his girlfriend, who eagerly rode him. “Oulie, you’re such a sorcery dork,” he said softly, hands going to cup her bottom. 

“I’m the first disciple,” she told him archly, rolling her hips until he started panting. She grinned and grabbed his horns, pulling his mouth down to hers. “You’re only the second disciple. And you know what that means?”

“Really?” Rathan gasped, hips pushing up against her weight. “Now?”

“As you should know well, my student, in the order of precedence,” she kissed him again, “I come first.”

“I don’t know,” he murmured, slick noises coming from them as he thrust up, spreading her open. “I am your prince. Surely I come first.”

She licked his nose. “Student, please, c-ah!” She bit her lip. “Control your lusts. I am showing you magic here. The spell just won’t work otherwise.”

Rathan grinned. “Well, if it’s for magic…” He twisted, bearing Oula down to the ground, and slipped out of her. With gentle lips, he kissed his way down the seam that ran down her chest from neck to navel. 

“N-no, my demonic icon,” Oula moaned, breaking into fits of giggles. “It needs to be in the… the unholy temple…”

“I know you’re ticklish there,” he grinned. “But I know where you’re even more ticklish.” His lips brushed against her pink, puffy pussy. “I guess I’m going to have to just offer prayers at the temple.”

“You’ve ruined the ritual! Oh no…” Oula managed between gasps. She grabbed his horns, forcing his face down onto her pussy as her legs wrapped around onto his back. “I guess we’re going to have to start ag… oh! Oh!” Rathan flicked his tongue up and down her slit, tasting her salty-sweet juices. He kissed her clit, alternating between sucking it and rubbing his curled tongue against the little hot protrusion.“Yes, right there!”

“Well, you know me. I’m an eager student,” he said, when he came up for air. “Always willing to practice.”

“You still have a lot… ah! A lot to learn! Stop talking back and put that tongue to work.”

“But teacher,” Rathan said, meeting her eyes, “I don’t know the words yet. You need to teach me the spells. Are there books in the temple that can teach me?”

Oula flopped back, giggling uncontrollably. The laughter was infectious, and Rathan flopped onto the grass, unable to focus on what he had been doing. He crawled up next to her, and Oula only burst into further hysterics.

“Your dick,” she managed, propping herself up on her elbows. “Look at it b-b-bouncing as you laugh!”

He glanced at it, and snorted. “I guess so?” He leaned over, and traced one of the red veins of her tattoo with his tongue.

Whatever she was trying to say was lost in her giggles.

“Oulie. You’re adorable,” he said, reaching out to rest one hand on her thigh. “I love you.”

Her pupils immediately shaped themselves into hearts, glowing with his red-pink light. “You mean it?” she moaned. Her tone was the same as when he had been going down on her, the giggles entirely banished.

“Of course I mean it, you daftie.”

She flailed at him, though not very hard. “You… don’t call me daft! And you know what you telling me you love me does!” she protested pathetically.

“What?” He tilted his head, grinning. “What does saying ‘I love you’ do? Because I love you,” he said, kissing her as he slipped two fingers into her eager slit. She gasped, cheeks pink, and sunk into his kiss. Curling his fingers up, he massaged her inner walls, wet noises escaping. She moaned breathily, little squeaks vocalised each time he brushed her nub. “Love you,” he murmured into her mouth, and that was enough to tip her over the edge.

Rathan held her as she twitched and moaned in his arms, holding her close, inhaling the sweet perfumed scent of her hair. She clenched down on his fingers, muscles trembling. To see her like that… yes, he wasn’t just saying it. He really did love her, in all her funny little ways. She was smart and pretty and… and just the best. 

“Love you,” she mumbled into his chest.

He smiled. “I guess you did come first, my lovely sorceress.” Birds were singing, the sky was very blue, and he was feeling good. She really knew how to cheer him up and-

Her hand closed around his dick. “Now,” Oula whispered as she pumped him, “show me how much you love me, my prince.”

“Well, I could… I suppose, write you a poem or…”

That got him an adorable glare. “Rathan. I want you in me. Make love to me!”

“Oh.” He clambered on top of her, positioning himself at her entrance. “Are you sure you don’t want a poem? I could probably…”

“Rathan! Fuck me now! Poems later!” She stopped him talking back any more pressing her lips to his as she wrapped her legs around his back, guiding him in. Which was quite all right by him.

Her loving moans drifted out of the clearing, matched soon by his gasps and sighs.


	5. Chapter 5

So. Oula was… um. Comforting Rathan. That was happening, Keris thought, blushing bright red.

At least they’d crept off to the river bank for their entertainment.

But that meant Keris’s easy, less mortifying option… um. Wasn’t an option anymore. And that meant that she’d need to talk to Haneyl. At least the noises had died down from the tent. From Kuha’s breathing, she sounded like she was dozing. And Haneyl was…

… well, she wasn’t asleep. But from the little gasps of breath and the wet noises, she was making her own entertainment. This was going to be awful. At least Iris was still with Aiko.

“Haneyl?” she tried softly. “I want to… I want to talk.”

A pause. An extravagant sigh, and fingers being wiped against cloth. The tread of soft feet. Then Haneyl yanked the tent ties open, standing there in the sunlight. She was naked, but modest in a way Keris was familiar with, with her long grey hair arranged to cover everything. Still, the signs of what she had been up to with Kuha were clear. The scent of sweat, sex-musk and Kuha’s pollen hang heavy around her. Her hair was mussed and stuck up on one side; her skin was slick in some places and sweaty in others.

“What?” Haneyl demanded, her expression mulish. “I’m with Kuha.”

“Come out and close the tent,” Keris commanded. She could see Kuha naked on the bed, clearly in a half-doze. “We need to talk, and neither of us want her hearing.”

“I’m not sure why it can’t wait. Come back later.”

Keris’s hackles rose. She didn’t ask for much from her children. But Haneyl’s petulant tone was getting on her nerves. “It can’t wait because I’m your mother and you’re being a brat,” she said softly. “So you’re coming with me, because I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to tell you off in front of your… friend.”

Her daughter’s lips pursed, but she trailed after her to a short distance away. Keris’s hair shot into the ground around her, calling up thorny bushes with bright red flowers that would serve to give them a little privacy.

“So are you going to tell me why you did that?” Keris demanded of her daughter.

“Did what?”

Keris gave her a very unimpressed look. “You know what you did. You acted like a spoiled brat to your brother - and yes, I know Zana was trying to get you worked up and trust me, I am going to talk to her. I might send her back home if she doesn’t have a very good reason. But I’m thinking maybe you need a timeout too.”

Her daughter crossed her arms, and smirked at her. Or at the very least bared her teeth. Yes, she was baring her teeth. Smiling didn’t involve so many teeth. “You’re not going to do that!” she said. “You’d run out of money without me!”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Keris said, not without a little bit of satisfaction. She had all her winnings from Hell’s casinos - putting Haneyl in time-out for a few months wouldn’t beggar her. Not when it might fix her daughter’s behaviour. “Now. Talk. Why are you acting like you are?”

Haneyl crossed her arms, looking her nose down at her mother. “I told you earlier. Rathan never tries for anything. He just gets things handed to him. Sorcery’s just another trinket for him. And I’ve been working much much harder at it than him so why does he get it first?”

“It’s… argh!” Keris blew out her cheeks, and tried to phrase things like she was talking to the twins. Haneyl was acting her chronological age, not her physical and mental age. “Sorcery doesn’t care about effort, Haneyl. I’m not lying to you.”

“That’s not fair!”

“I know it’s not! That’s just how it works! Look, the reason I’ve been teaching you the theory is so you’ll be a better sorceress when you make the leap. Rathan doesn’t show up to lessons, so he’s got to learn all this stuff.” Keris took a deep breath, and tried to ignore her daughter’s smell. “Rathan and Oula just stumbled onto the last step. I didn’t plan it. Haneyl, listen to me, what I’m doing here isn’t teaching you sorcery. What I’m trying to do is put you in the right place where you can realise what’s going on. And I think you’re right there, I think you really are. The next step is one you have to make. Because choices matter. They’re important.”

Haneyl considered this, cheeks turning pink. Unfortunately, she took the wrong meaning from it. “So you’re saying it’s _my_ fault, then?” she demanded, throwing her hands and her hair wide. She loomed over her mother.

Keris averted her eyes. “No, I’m not saying that… and cover yourself!”

“Oh, so there’s something wrong about how I look on top of me being too stupid to learn sorcery?” The embers in her hair whomped to life, burning green as she worked herself up again.

“I’ve put up with a lot from you,” Keris growled. “I know you went went and… and had loud sex with Kuha to get on my nerves.”

“Oh, so it’s not just that I like it and I might want to have some fun after you were awful! No, it has to all be about you!”

“You’re not fooling anyone! I know you’ve been sleeping with her on this trip, but you weren’t,” her hand gesture took in everything, “flaunting it before! I told you before, as long as you’re happy, I don’t mind if you have flings - but I don’t want to know.”

Eyes glowed a brilliant green. “You do mind, though!” Haneyl’s expression was twisted into an ugly snarl. “Urgh! You’re such a bitch about this!”

“Argh! You’re so… just put it away, Haneyl! No one wants to see you like that until you’ve cleaned yourself up.”

“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.” She swept her hair back, hands on her hips, fingers pointing in towards her bush.

“Bathing is totally different to… to your state when you’re straight out of bed!”

“And it’s nothing everyone hasn’t seen from you!” Haneyl snapped. Her shoulders shook.

“Yes, in the ba-”

“You fucked Mother in front of a massive crowd in Hell! And then you two put on a show and I heard people raving about how sexy it was!”

Keris leaned back, mouth opening and closing in the silence that followed that outburst. “That… that was something else,” she mumbled, cheeks flaming red.

“You made a fortune from fucking in public! And you dare fucking lecture me that I’m friends with Kuha and Elly and Rounen and… well, it doesn’t matter how many people I’m friends with!” Haneyl balled her hands into fists, embers dripping from where her nails broke the skin. “If you’re going to get on my back that I made noise when enjoying myself with Kuha, then I’m going to fucking make you own up to the fact you love sex as much as I do! You’re just a raging bitch about anyone else having fun!”

Red hair lashed out without thinking, tearing up part of the thorns. “I don’t want you repeating my mistakes! I… we, the thing in the arena, that was a fuck-up! Sasi leaned on a button and we… we didn’t mean to broadcast it! It was a mistake!”

“Mistake? It got you rich!” With the last word, fire started to roil and boil from Haneyl’s hair, dripping down her body and smouldering on the ground.

“That’s not the same! I didn’t want to do that!”

“Then why did you go and flaunt yourself with Mother _again_ only a few days later.” Haneyl’s accent was so Nexan-street, Keris suspected other people would have problems understanding her. “You love it. You’re just a hypocrite!”

“I am not a hypocrite, and that was not the same kind of performance!” Keris snarled, vision blurring. “I… this isn’t about me! This is about you!”

“You’re just like me!” her daughter lashed back. “You have Mother and you’re fucking Testolagh…”

“What?” Keris paled. How did she-

“I’ve smelled him on you. You want to get on my back about how many friends I take to bed, but you’re just as free as me. Mother, Testolagh, Golden Child, all those women in your sex cult…” Haneyl jabbed her finger at her. “You’re just a fucking hypocrite who pretends you’re better than me! When you are me!”

“This is not at all the same!” Keris snapped. “I… firstly, you’re not going to talk about Testolagh to anyone, got it? Because Sasi wanted us to work out and it’s not working out and you’ll break Aiko’s heart if she thinks I’m going to be her second-mama and marry her daddy and she’ll get to attend the wedding! This is complicated! Not like you and how you let anyone into your bed.”

“Oh ho ho, there it is! For your information, I don’t! They have to be cute!” Haneyl snapped. “Or funny!”

“And the stuff I’m doing in Saata…”

“The women you’re doing,” Haneyl leered.

“... is part of my _job_! It’s just like what Sasi does! Golden Child likes girls, so I used that to get my hooks into her - and I’ve turned that into something that gives me a totally different way to control the Hui Cha!” Keris kicked the ground. “It’s nothing like what you do! Just like me and Sasi putting a lot of time into keeping the bosses happy isn’t like you moaning like a harlot who’s putting on a show and risking your little brothers and sisters hearing!”

“It’s exactly the same! You’re just in denial! Stop being a bitch!”

“Don’t call me a bitch, you brat!” Keris balled her hands into fists, glaring up at her daughter. “You don’t understand anything about how things are!”

“That’s just what people say when they can’t actually explain themselves!” Haneyl snapped, eyes gleaming dangerously.

“And finally, when me and Sasi do things - even if we screw up and… the point is. The point is. When we do that, we love each other! We’ve been together for years! We’re in love and… and so it might not be what the… hah, the Immaculates want from us, but we’re making it work! We’re a family!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Haneyl’s hair was lashing in rage - and so were the vines around them.

“Well, it’s totally different from you and your… your bedmates!”

“Oh? I’d just love to know why you think you’re so much better than me!”

“You don’t love Kuha! You’re not in love with her like Calesco was!” Keris said, words falling out one after another, carried on a wave of anger. “And… and Elly and Rounen are your friends who you fuck! And…” she trailed away, her voice losing some of its heat. “And then there’s all those people in Saata you seduce and… and the affairs you had when travelling over the South West and the way you cut a swathe through the Tengese but didn’t seem to care when you left them behind and… and…”

“And what?” Haneyl demanded.

I don’t think you love anyone, Keris didn’t say. But the words hung in the air between them, as naked as Haneyl, dripping with dirty meaning. Both of them were scarlet red and shaking with the toxic brew of emotions swirling through them.

Haneyl drew a deep shuddering breath, steam rising from her nostrils. Her hair was still, but in the same way that tensed muscles were still; barely held back from explosive movement. “Right. That’s what you mean.”

“Haneyl, I…”

“It’s just another way I’m not Rathan to you. After all, he’s deeply, truly in love with Oula. The adopted daughter you want more than me. They’re in love and they only fuck each other and it’s the cute, romantic relationship you so clearly want.”

“You two are different, that’s not…”

“No, no, I understand. You think I’m broken and damaged because I don’t get what the big fucking deal is that makes Oula and Calesco act like screeching jealous harpies. Because of course that’s what you need. To get murderous because two people had some fun together.”

“You’re talking yourself into a frenzy. I don’t… you…”

“You must hate me so much,” Haneyl exhaled, breath sickly sweet. “You bundled up everything you never liked about yourself and fed it to me.” Big fat silvery tears welled up in her eyes, steaming from her heat. “Of course I’ll never be good enough for you. You hate all the responsibility and paperwork that comes with your job, so you made me for it. You hate having to care about money when you’re wasting it on Zanara’s latest stupid thing, so you made me so I’d always make sure to support you in your old age. And you hate it when you… when you’re fucking someone you don’t love, so I can never have the perfect romantic love you gave Rathan. Because… because to you, I’m nothing more than a reminder that you fucked your way through that whole cult of triad women to get control of them! And you claimed you hated it but you loved it!”

Keris said nothing, though her heart was breaking. Because what could she say? It hurt because it was too close to home. Haneyl was part of her - and though Sasi was free with her body, she was even freer with her heart. The way that Haneyl didn’t seem to have any romance in her must have come from part of Keris.

And she didn’t say anything, because she wasn’t sure what she could say that wouldn’t hurt Haneyl worse. Her daughter was truly naked here - not in the flesh, but in the mind. Safer to let her scream at her than risk saying anything more. She wasn’t… it wasn’t…

… it had all gone wrong.

“So you know what I’m going to do,” Haneyl hissed, wiping her eyes on her hair. “I’m going back in there. Back to Kuha. Because at least she doesn’t wrinkle her nose when she looks at me! And at least when she screams at me, it’s because she’s happy, not because she wants me to hurt!”

Keris swallowed.

“And when I’m doing it,” Haneyl continued, “I want you to think about the fact that it’s part of you doing it. It might be a bit of you that you hate and that you don’t want, but I’m still part of you! And so maybe one day when you stop being such a _fucking hypocrite_ you’ll stop hating me!”

She turned on her heel, and stormed through the thorns, which twisted out of her way. There was a moment when Haneyl nearly lost her balance, but righted herself with an angry jerk of her arm. She headed back into the tent, letting it flap closed behind her. Keris raised one lock of hair, wanting to reach out - but not moving.

“Oh, Haneylhyra, what’s the…” she heard Kuha start to say with a yawn, before she was cut off by a deep, hungry kiss. Wet, vegetation slithered against itself and against flesh, and Haneyl moaned into Kuha’s mouth she guided her lover’s fingers into her. Then came the protest of the mattress and…

Keris covered her ears, and fled the scene. Whether from guilt, shame or embarrassment, even she didn’t know.

* * *

Sobs drifted down out of a strange fruit-tree with leaves in pink and tan. This tainted land had done things to the plants in the direction Keris had wandered away from the camp.

She didn't want to be anywhere near the camp. People would try to talk to her. She'd hear things she didn't want to hear - and other people would hear her crying. And she didn’t want to go looking for Asarin, who would… well, Keris just couldn’t bear it if she judged her. And the nearest river was a no-go, because that’s where Rathan and Oula were. So she had wandered to the border of the wyldpool.

Keris had half a mind to do something big and flashy to get the attention of the twisted inhabitants of the place so she could slaughter them all. That would at least take her mind off things. But something held her back. She didn’t need any more trouble. She just… she just wanted to be alone.

Settling down on the strangely warm branch, she took a deep breath.

“I’ll fucking murder you if you try to eat me,” she told the tree. And perhaps its branches shivered more than they should have in the cool breeze.

She wanted her mama. She’d know what to do. She would!

Best to go to Dulmea, though. Evedelyl was back at the camp, and... no. There was no way she was going back there. Within her Domain, though, there were no awful mortifying _noises_ from angry shameless daughters being deliberately crude.

But when Keris sank down into the inner dream that was the world within her, she didn’t open her eyes to the City. She opened them on the foetid, humid warmth of the Swamp.

“Fuck.” Her thoughts of… her anger and distress and… this was all Haneyl’s fault, anyway. Stupid spoiled brat of a daughter leading her off course, into the mist-wracked expanses where grey vegetation blocked out the light of the red moon and green flames flickered beneath the roots of trees.

That was how things were meant to be, at least. But here, close to the Fog Wall, there was something wrong with the Swamp.

The trees were dying.

Leafless canopies had tangled themselves together into a ceiling of bare branches, twisted and knotted in agony. The water was clean and clear. Nothing lived in it. Grey ash was steeped up in the corners of roots, where the little flames had burned themselves out. Stooping, Keris brushed her fingers against a rotten kat corpse by the water’s edge.

Why hadn’t anything eaten this free meal?

It was quiet. As quiet as the Ruin. Nothing moved in the undergrowth. Nothing buzzed in the air. No sziroms laughed and played and argued over the filing classifications of books or the best sauces to use in a stew.

“Haneyl?” Keris tried, wondering if… no, of course she wouldn’t hear her. Her daughter was outside, being awful. But her shock of scarlet hair was the only colour in this grey landscape. “Anyone?”

White mist crept along the floor, roiling and boiling against Keris’s bare feet. It brushed over the kat’s body, devouring it. It tore flakes off the brittle leaves on the floor and coiled around her ankles, prickling her skin and raising goosebumps.

She heard the pounce from behind her just in time to spin out of the way of the white-haired Fang that landed, skidding and snarling, next to the edge of the water. Slitted grey eyes fixed on her and it bared sharp teeth with an authoritative hiss. This one was clearly older - or at least longer lasting - than the others that Keris had seen. Quite apart from the little twines of stolen Isles rainbow-rope in its hair, white scars marked where something had carved a crude snake-head on its left arm.

“Whatever you’re saying,” Keris told it in frustrated tones, “you don’t seem to get that _I still don’t understand hissing_. Is this about the trees all dying? Have you been doing that?”

Another hiss. A flicker of annoyance that wasn’t hers - she was getting better at catching those, now. They were always easier to pick out with a Fang in front of her.

“Okay, not about the trees, not you doing it, or both? The dead trees aren’t you? Or is it just that you don’t care?”

A hiss. Keris decided to take that as an affirmative. She definitely got the feeling that her lower soul didn’t give a crap about some dead trees.

“Fine,” she said. “So what _is_ the problem? You don’t usually show up and grab me, even when I’m out near the Rim. Are the Festivals not satisfying you?” She winced. “Please don’t throw another tantrum. I have enough tantruming souls right now.”

The Fang stalked closer to her, hair flicking around its body irritably. Or maybe not irritably. The body language didn’t quite match. It tilted its head, nostrils flared as it sniffed at her.

Then with a violent yank, it pulled at the neck of her dress with a lock of hair, tearing at it.

“Stop that!” Keris snapped. “That’s my dress! You… you know how to steal things if you want one!” She looked her naked copy up and down. Now that she looked more closely, it had love bites on its neck and inner thighs. “Not that I think you do.”

It hissed again, angrily, and grabbed at her with more hair. She scowled and deflected, backing up towards the trees.

“If you want me naked, forget it,” she snapped. “I’m really not in the mood right now, okay? Especially not for... for _this_. Whatever ‘this’ would be.”

Not that she’d never considered it - Pekhijira’s Fangs did look like her, after all, and Keris knew damn well that she was a very attractive woman. But while she’d fooled around with her Gales, opening her bed to what was, charitably, a bestial akuma whose animalistic po-mind lacked any command or understanding of language... well, it hadn’t happened yet and it probably wasn’t going to, barring some major shifts in what she was looking for out of sex. Gales at least wouldn’t start hissing and biting her if she just wanted a quick fuck.

It hissed at her, and she felt her cheeks redden as a blush made itself known. “No. Oh no.” What it wanted was all too clear. And it only made itself clearer as it started playing with itself in front of her, eyes locked on her face. She… it was was getting off on her.

Keris’s flush intensified, and it was only part embarrassment. There was the - unwanted, horrible, not at all her! - lust. And there was anger, at this stupid, blatant thing. This thing, as shameless as Haneyl at her worst! Or more so!

“I said _no!”_ she shouted, flushing. “Just... urgh, just go away, would you! Leave me alone! If you’re not going to help, why are you even fucking here?” It bared its teeth in a hiss of pleasure, and she snarled back, unable to shake the feeling it was laughing at her for the unintentional double-meaning.

“Go _away!”_ she screamed, pushing off the tree she’d backed into and launching herself into a furious spin-kick that caught full in its stupid face and-

The pressure of flesh and bone against her shin wavered, dissipated... and vanished. Her leg spun on with no resistance as the Fang collapsed into mist, rushing up towards her and spiralling in, towards her face, down her throat...

... oh fuck godsdammit, no.

The surge of emotion-without-thought hit Keris like a fogburst and landed her flat on her back; head spinning, gasping for air through straining lungs, shaking all over and suddenly, painfully aroused. She was also cursing herself. Fuck! Had she... had she _seriously_ just fallen for the exact same pox-brained trick Pekhijira had used back in Taira to teach her fear? How had she forgotten it could force its Fangs back into her the same way she reabsorbed her Gales?

More importantly, how did she keep getting outwitted by the soul that was meant to be the _dumber_ one of the pair of them?

“Okay,” Keris growled, glaring around this dying clearing. She grabbed at her torn dress, checked the flow of the Fog Wall, and headed anti-clockwise at a sprint. She wanted out of this dying landscape, and the Meadows were always welcoming. “So you want something. You always do. So get to it.”

But unlike last time she didn’t lose her language. She just had the annoying throbbing in her core that was something that the damn snake had forced on her. She bit her lower lip, and yanked her hand away from where it had been massaging her breast through the tear in her dress.

“What do you want?” she screamed at the fog wall.

The echo of her voice bounced back. “What do you want?”

With a sigh, Keris slumped down on a dry hillock, and watched this too-clean, too-clear water run through the roots of dead trees. What did she want, Keris thought, a lock of hair creeping to her crotch. What did she want?

She wanted... she wanted...

... she wanted things to be easy again. She wanted a relationship - just _one_ relationship - that wasn’t complicated by resentfulness or anger or judging disapproval, where the other person wasn’t itching to go find something else to pounce on or provoke or punch, where she wasn’t having to mollify any prudishness or avoid injuring their pride or deal with them being... kind of a mess inside. Just one relationship that was easy, and which asked nothing of her, and was... fun.

When had she last had carefree, consequence-free fun?

Keris thought back... and back, and back, and back. Maybe some moments with Zanyi... but Zanyi wasn’t here, and anyway that wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted right now. Hell didn’t count - she was too on-edge there. Golden Child was wo- wasn’t the kind of support she needed. Sasi was far away and had her own stuff going on, and Testolagh was right out.

... Ney?

She’d had fun with Ney. Oh, she’d been lying to him, but he’d _known_ that, and she’d known he’d known, and anyway he’d been lying to her as well. It had been an open acknowledgement between them; a game played with smiles - and which hadn’t come between them during those nights they’d shared.

She’d liked it. She bit her lip. Yes, she’d liked it.

But it had been years since Keris had sent Ney a dream. More than one. She’d sent him that one after arriving safe and sound back in the southwest, with much gloating and smugness laced through it - and then a couple more in the months after. But that had been it. He might have forgotten about her now - or met someone else and shrugged off the memory of the gorgeous rival who got one over on him two years ago. Maybe he was all busy with stupid missions for the stupid naib who probably still hated her for stealing from him and smashing up his stupid pyramid and then fucking his stupid spymaster into the bed all that night and most of the next morning.

Keris realised her hand had drifted back to her breast, and honestly didn’t care. She’d spin him a dream. A dream made up of all this stupid lust that the snake had pumped into her which wasn’t something she’d wanted or anything. She’d make him a dream so sexy he’d wake up in a sticky puddle, and think of her all day and…

… and then what? She wouldn’t even know if it had worked. She slumped back again, back against a stump. All she’d get from that would be a brief fantasy and the knowledge that she’d probably made his night. But that wasn’t a relationship. That was… that was _less_ than Haneyl had with her one-night partners, and that wasn’t something she was willing to lose to her damn daughter on.

Something about the tenor of the water had changed. It was thicker. More glutinous. And there was a smell in the air. A smell that reached back through her nostrils into her brain, a smell that brought her back years. A smell from Nexus.

The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Dreamdust.

All around her, the too-clear water of the Swamp was bleeding to black as thick Meadows-tar surged down the channels, flowing downhill.

A gull called out overhead, and Keris flinched, curling in on herself. She screwed her eyes shut, afraid of what she would see. If this was the Meadows, it was something with Calesco’s core nature and that meant to look too closely, to listen too closely, to pay attention to whatever was going on would hurt. And she couldn’t hurt like that. Not when… no.

“Shut up!” she screamed.

The tar touched her fingers. Either the hillock was sinking or the tar was rising. And now she tried to run, but it was too late. It had her. And as she ran, she just whipped a thick cord behind her. It started off black, but as she stretched and stretched and stretched it, it took on a deep heartblood red.

Then came the yank, as she hit the end of the cord - and the yank tore off all her skin. There was no pain, though. Just the smell of dreamdust and the taste of blood.

Dimly, through the feedback from her real body, she felt her skin collapse in on itself like an empty set of clothes.

Blackness took her.


	6. Chapter 6

Nothing.

There was nothing. No light, no form, no substance. For a second, the formless mind panicked - and in panicking she flailed.

Space.

It stretched out around her. She could sense it now, though there was still no sight, no sound, no scent. But she could feel the sensation of a vast space around her, of having her bearings in the empty void. There was distance, length, direction, room to move. The sudden change blunted the rising edge of panic, and she gasped, hyperventilating a little.

Air. Form. She had a body. She was breathing. Neither had been true until she’d tried, and then they’d just been there. Instantly. Like they were givens.

... huh.

Was... was that how this worked?

Obviously, something had gone weird, Keris could tell. This was... not what usually happened when she was in her Domain. So odds were good she’d... imbibed some new gift of the All-Makers, and accidentally used it. Again. She’d dropped into this un-place, where there’d been nothing. But then she had moved, and movement required space... so there had been space. She’d breathed, and breathing needed air to breathe and a body to breathe it... so both had solidified.

Experimentally, she closed her eyes, then opened them.

Light.

“... well,” she said; sound springing into being to allow her words to be. “This is boring.”

Before her was an infinite expanse of faintly illuminated flat white nothing. Below her dangling feet was an equally infinite drop of faintly illuminated flat white nothing. Checking above, behind and to either side revealed that there had apparently been a recent sale on infinite stretches of faintly illuminated flat white nothingness, and whoever had been first in line with bags in hand had dumped them all around Keris for some reason.

“Okay,” she said. “So... Dulmea?”

No response. She pursed her lips thoughtfully.

“Pekhijira?” she guessed tentatively. “Am I in... I dunno, the space between realms? Is this what’s outside the Fog Wall?”

She glanced around again. There were no twenty-kilometre-wide cyclones harbouring infant realms of existence within them to be found.

“Can I at least have an apple while I think?” she asked the empty void at large, making a grabby motion with her hand. It failed to close on an apple. Unsurprising, really. Stuff like this didn’t usually work from her thinking about it.

Closing her eyes again, Keris stopped thinking. Instead of trying to shape it consciously, she remembered the feel of apples - the weight in her hand, the scent, the tasty juice running over her tongue, the crunch between her teeth...

Her fingers were wrapped around crisp red flesh. She opened her eyes, stared at it for a while, then automatically took a bite. Mmm. Apple. Yum.

Okay. So that was how this worked.

Now, more importantly. Why?

“... wait a second,” she realised, halfway through the snack. “I was thinking about... sending a dream. To Ney. But this isn’t an arrow-dream, so...”

Keris’s eyes widened, and she glanced around again. She looked at the apple again.

Very slowly, she began to smile.

“O_kay_ then,” she mused, cracking her knuckles and shaking her shoulders out. “I’m not sending a dream this time. I _am_ the dream. I can show up in person.” The smile became a wicked grin. “Let’s see if I can have some _fun_ with this, then.”

Closing her eyes again, she thought for a while. She couldn’t overthink this. Actually, she couldn’t think this period; her brain would only get in the way. She needed something instinctive, familiar. A blank canvas she could garb in dream-stuff.

Gentle pressure surrounded her like a loving embrace, and Keris rose like a goddess from the waters. She could _feel_ the living sea around her; an ocean of bright red blood stretching out in every direction. Scarlet rivulets poured off the Keris that was the girl, and the Keris that was the dream sent it rippling out in a wave across the emptiness.

And then, from the wake of that first wave, she called forth her clothing for this water-body, this dream-world. There was no need to think about this, either. What else could Keris put atop water - even water so strange as this ichor-sea - other than the first covering she ever remembered knowing for it?

The great spire of the Council’s palace was the first thing to break the surface; the statue a delicate thing of black steel instead of golden metal made green and black by time and smog. Then came the white tower blocks and the higher ground of Bastion and Cinnabar. Ruddy pulley cars and speckled monochrome tenements followed, the markets and foundries and slums, until finally even the low-lying docks from Firewander around the bottom of Sentinel’s Hill to Nighthammer emerged. All of it resting on the canals that were its lifeblood, and all of it cast in red and white and black.

Nexus rose from the water, and Keris laughed delightedly to welcome it. She let go of her skin and her body dissolved, leaving only the city. She flexed her streets and flushed water through her canals and yawned the doors and windows of her buildings; fascinated at how natural it felt - and then reformed, grinning.

A grin that faltered and turned ashen as she realised _where_ she’d reformed.

“No,” she breathed, shrinking in on herself. The room was just as she remembered it. Two and a half metres by three on the third floor; one wall taken up by a single bed with a hard mattress and a wobbly leg. The floorboards were rough under the tatty brown rug and dim light filtered in through a single grimy window high in the wall; too small for even her to fit her shoulders through. Two overturned crates held the majority of her meagre possessions, apart from the backup knives under the bundled too-thin blanket, and...

_... and the two knives in her lap, as she sat here in the fading light of the evening. No candle for her, no movement that might give her presence away. Kit Firewander sat here in the dark; eighteen years old again, wrinkling her nose against the stench of alcohol and dreamdust that lay heavy on the air. Short-haired and vigilant, she sat still as a statue while the candle in the room next door burned down and dark came over Nexus. She fisted her hands around the hilts of her knives and listened to the sounds from the other bedroom of the little Firewander apartment. Listened, and waited, and-_

** _“No!”_ **

The central chamber of the Tomb of Singing Blades was a desecrated shrine to death and horror. Rents and rubble littered the walls and floor from the battle that had taken place here. Precious things had been ripped up or pried loose with brutal efficiency by an Exalt numb with horror and blind to what she was doing. The remains of Rosseah lay there still; decomposing on the floor into a mass of blood and dissolving flesh.

Keris surfaced from the pool and gasped for air like a drowning woman, clutching at the location as though it were a life raft. However horrible the memories here were; they weren’t... they...

... they were Keris’s memories.

Not Kit’s.

The only scents here were those of blood and death. Not dreamdust.

It took her a while to calm down. Counting helped. So did focusing on the fight she’d had here - the yidak lord she’d barely stayed ahead of; the remnant of Rosseah which had probably come closer to killing her than anything since. She’d won that fight, just by the skin of her teeth. The evidence was right there; soaking into the floor - or, no, she’d inhaled that body. It was in Ogin now. The memory of the evidence, then.

Her hands were still fisted around her- around _Kit’s_ knives. Keris jerked backwards and flung them away, shutting her eyes and flinching away as they clattered across the floor. She shuddered. Okay. Okay, no. This wasn’t a past-dream. She needed to get her mind off... off anything like that, or this. Time to change the scene.

Slowly but surely, in fits and starts, the central chamber changed as Keris focused. She softened taut architectural muscles, donned beautiful furniture-lingerie, plucked and shaved and painted herself with art that saw no distinction between body and temple.

Eventually, what lay within the formidable defences set down by years past was a bedchamber - not as demonic or lewd as Love Unchained, but decadent nonetheless. A great bed sat where the bodies of long-dead heroes had once lain on their platforms, and silken drapes and hangings swaddled the walls and turned the chamber into the interior of some great tent. Ribbons and lacy gauze hid the ceiling under a false embroidered sky, while rugs and furs covered the floor. Trophies and decorations were dotted around here and there - a set of tribal spears and bows on an ivory rack, a feathered cloak speckled in white and black, the skull of a great cat which comes up to Keris’s hip and sat like a table in one corner of the room.

This would be where she’d lead her prey. This would be the endpoint of the chase she’d set. Oh, she’d make Ney dance a merry path through the city to get here - through all five districts and back again. But this would be where it would finish.

She hummed, and the bedchamber resonated with sweet, seductive music.

Yes, this would be where she’d get Ney to come. And come, and come, and come.

Now just one more tweak to the city outside. Something to put her mark on it. Something to put on a show...

Dissolving her avatar, the Keris-that-was-the-dream took in the whole of her creation at once; her vision encompassing every street and building, penetrating every wall and cellar. Apart from one single block to the south that she averted her gaze from; she felt the city that was her skin and the canals that were her veins and the sky that was her hair.

And in a smooth and easy motion, she turned a handstand and set it on its head.

The city hung, inverted as if suspended from an impossibly vast ceiling. The pale pink sky with its fluffy white blood-splattered clouds drifted peacefully below. The blood-channel canals sloshed and quivered at the shift in gravity, but after a moment settled; content to flow impossibly along the roof of the dream in blithe disregard of physical sense. Pondering her change, Keris sent unseen hair-tendrils of dream along the streets and rooftops like shuttles on a loom; weaving a network of glass pathways beneath the hanging buildings and along the upturned roads; close enough that the ground-turned-sky was never more than a short jump above the head of one who walked them. Assuming, of course, that a dreamer could find the near-invisible platforms - and not fall off into the yawning sky below.

There, she decided with a happy nod. _Now_ she was satisfied. Her dream was built.

Time to wait for a pretty little fly to go to sleep and stumble into her net.


	7. Chapter 7

It had been hours. 

The tent was a jungle hothouse. The air was heavy with pollen and floral scents; green fire burned atop bonsai trees. The sun had set outside but the occupants of the room had barely noticed.

Sometimes, Kuha wondered if she’d been ruined for mortal lovers. When you could get what she got from the demons she’d slept with, humans didn’t have the same allure. 

But then again, she’d lost her virginity to a neomah and her first long-term relationship had been with a demon lord. Sweaty fumblings with serving boys had their place, but there were so much better things out there.

She wasn’t thinking about that right now. She wasn’t really thinking about much. Her world was pink-hazed sensation. Her face was red; love bites mottled her arms and neck and breasts; her eyelids fluttered. There was something in her cunt and something in her ass and the fire in her core was burning all her thoughts away. 

“Fuck me fuck me fuck me,” she chanted in gasps, as the vines and the hair that bound her limbs bounced her up and down. Her sweat-soaked auburn hair clung to her face. She was tied so tightly she was little more than something for Haneyl to move and take as she saw fit, and it felt so good to be filled, to have so many things sliding in and out of her. 

The room was full of wet, sloppy sounds, hoarse gasps and tired moans. There were mouths everywhere, attending to her skin; licking, sucking, kissing, nipping. Her wings were out and Haneyl was caressing the silk-soft feathers. Sometimes a pussy or a cock-like tongue that dribbled sweet nectar would offer itself to her, and she would lick or suck it with glee, knowing she would get a demon’s sweetness.

She wasn’t sure how long this had been going on. Neither was she sure when Haneylhyra had become so inhuman. She hadn’t started this way, but Kuha wasn’t sure if she’d become like this all at once or it had been more progresisve. Her many heads hung down like fruit from the branches that rose from her neck, trading turns as they leant in for inverted kisses. The same had happened to her arms, and those fleshy branches were lending their many mouths to Kuha’s pleasure as they held her tight. Her legs still split, but her feet had rooted themselves in the ground. Flesh writhed and shifted, taking on new forms. Neither animal nor vegetable, yet both.

In her current state, Kuha only muttered praises to the demoness who revealed herself to her. Praises cut off whenever Haneyl pushed another ridged, bumpy tongue into her or drew it slowly out. The slow rhythm drew growing groans and gasps from Kuha, interspersed by Haneyl’s grunts and ragged breaths.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Haneyl moaned from many mouths, punctuating each word with a thrust. “Take it!”

“So good!” Kuha moaned to spur on Haneyl, and she moaned for herself.

As her lover fucked her, Kuha’s high-pitched noises grew more and more sustained. The vines grew up her thighs, cupping and framing her bottom, and there always seemed to be one of them squirming against her clit, so each motion brought a red hot bolt of pleasure. 

“You like this,” Haneyl whispered into her ear, one of her heads dangling closer. The scent of sickly sweet flowers mixed with their sex. Their sweaty forms rolled against one another. “You want this.”

Kuha let out a warbling gasp. “I do, I do,” she whispered as their lips met again. She was trapped in the larger woman’s embrace, like a bug in one of those plants Haneylhyra grew, and there was nothing like that feeling of being controlled. Her whole body was flushed. Her chest rose and fell and her eyes rolled back in her head. Thin cords of drool escaped from her mouth, pushed out by her shuddering breaths.

When it hit, she screamed out to the world. Her whole body tightened, pussy clamping down on the fat tongue that was penetrating her. Haneyl knew what was happening and thrust in, stuffing her overfull with a pain that transmuted to pleasure. Kuha gasped and mumbled, twitching and trembling in ecstasy. 

As she came down from the hellish high, she yelped again. The muscles in her thighs were cramping up. And they weren’t the only things that were hurting. “Mmm… st-stop,” she gasped. “L-let me down. Hurts.” 

Slowly Haneyl pulled out, leaving Kuha dangling from her bonds. The vines binding her arms and legs slowly lowered her down, and she sagged down to her knees, wheezing out brassy pollen. Her thighs hurt too much to stand and her chest heaved in great gasps. Her gaping pussy oozed pollen-laden drool onto the ground; her asshole twitched convulsively.

“That… that…” she said, sucking air in between her teeth as she rubbed at her thighs. “Cramp. Fuck. I think… think I pulled something. You made me come too hard.” No one fucked like Haneylhyra. And… and she was stiff. And sore. And in the afterglow, she just wanted to cuddle. She’d come. So many times. But Haneylhyra got off on seeing Kuha - and others - squirm in absolute pleasure. She liked the taste.

There… there were advantages to men, and the male refractory period.

“Ow. Not you. You’re so good,” she mumbled up to Haneyl, tears in her bleary eyes. 

“Of course I am.” A fleshy branch lifted her up by the shoulders, and turned her around. “Come on. She hasn’t even come back yet. So…” Sweat-coated, her countless tongues painted with Kuha’s pollen, mottled with a sex flush, the demon tree Haneyl waited impatiently.

“Han… Haneylhyra. Please. I just need to catch my breath. You’re too much for me. I’m… I’m only human. I need a rest.” Kuha pinched her cheeks. She tried to look away from the fleshy _thing_ in front of her and couldn’t. Rounen and Elly had both mentioned that in the demon realm Kerishyra ruled over, Haneylhyra was also a great forest with faces on its fruit. She’d never seen her take that form before. “Please. Come to bed. Not as the tree.” 

“Why?” Dangling heads leaned in from meaty branches, kissing her face, shoulders and wings. “Aren’t you enjoying this?”

“Y-yeah.” She had been. But now… well, things changed when you weren’t squirming in pleasure and you saw fully what had been fucking you. “Come on, please, Haneylhyra. My legs are cramping up. An’ I’m sore. C-carry me to the bed, please. My princess.”

That seemed to catch Haneyl’s attention, and her tree-body shuddered, cracking open at the front. The heads fell off from the branches, quickly decomposing to mulch, and the flesh was now much more clearly wood. A more human Haneyl stepped out of the tree’s opening. Kuha’s brassy pollen coated the lower half of face. Her cheeks were flushed; her hair wild and bushy; the hair under her arms and between her legs matted and sticky. Her veins were dark and stood out, especially on the paler skin of her breasts and inner thighs. There was something wild and glassy about her eyes. She lifted Kuha up in a bridal carry, one hand going to caress her thighs - and other things. 

“Mmm, yes,” Haneyl said, a finger in Kuha’s oozing, aching slit. “I think you need a massage.”

Kuha giggled, and yawned, exhausted. “I think you’re prettier like this,” she mumbled, nuzzling Haneyl’s neck. Her warmth sunk into her. “So nice. How you’re like a h’t wa’er bottle.”

“You’re never prettier than when you’re freshly fucked,” Haneyl said, sitting Kuha down on the bed of flowers.

Glancing around the mess of the room, Kuha sighed. “Ker’shyra is going to get on my back ‘bout the maps,” she said, looking up at her lover blearily.

“Don’t think about her. She won’t take you away from me,” Haneyl said firmly. “I give you what you need. And you know, don’t you!” Haneyl leaned over to kiss Kuha, breasts inviting Kuha to reach up and hold. Even after all that, Haneyl’s nipples were rock hard. “I’m better at eating you out than Elly.”

“Yeah…”

“My tongue is better than Rounen’s cock.”

“Yeah…” Kuha rested her head against Haneyl’s damp thighs, playfully kissing around her plump labia. The muscles were twitching below her skin. “I know. You bought it out tw’ce.”

Haneyl’s groin twitched, something moving below the surface. Her pussy spread itself open, lower lips swelling and growing plumper, and out of the pinkness and the hair emerged a fat, wet tongue. It was as wide - and as long - as a man’s cock, and covered in little bumps and ridges. The fat red muscle was shockingly bright against her flushed flesh. 

“I think you’re ready for another round. Look what you just did to me. Are you going to see to this?” she teased.

“No. Let’s… urgh.” Kuha spat out a hair. “C’ddle for a bit. When I’ve got my breath, I’ll ea-”

“I think you want it. After all, I’m certainly a better fuck than Calesco!”

“-t your pu…” A pause. Then; “What the hell, Haneyl?” Kuha demanded, leaning back. She patted her cheeks firmly, waking herself up.

“Oh, you love it.” Haneyl said, looking smug. She reached down, lifting Kuha up by the armpits until she was upright. Her lower tongue ran along Kuha’s puffy and aching, parted slit. When Kuha’s tired legs bent, her weight forced herself down onto the twitching muscle. “My sister couldn’t give you this.”

“Get off me!”

“I…”

“Get off!” Kuha batted her hands away, leaning back on trembling, coltish legs and her wings. She wiped a sweaty arm against her sweaty brow, glaring. “What the fuck was that?”

Haneyl pouted, then it turned into an ugly snarl. “You mean you think she’s better than me?” she demanded, sprawling back. She spread her legs, hands on her hips, her pink, drooling gash on offer. The tongue dangled obscenely, wet and twitching. Thick cords of their mixed juices oozed down from it.

“I’m not going to tell you if you’re a better lay than your sister! W-what’s got into you?” Kuha snapped back, cheeks aflame. “I’m not… this isn’t…” Despite everything, she couldn’t help but stare down at Haneylhyra’s pussy and the pleasures she knew it held. “Please never ask me that!”

“Oh, right, it’s just like that?” Haneyl smiled. “Ok. You just don’t want to talk about it. Fine. I respect that.”

“Yes!”

Haneyl grabbed her arm, pulling her into a hug. The sex musk surrounded Kuha, their bare skin sticking together. Their legs tangled together and Haneyl tripped, the two of them going down together. Kuha, flat on her back, stared up, Haneyl’s breasts in her face. Her lips parted.

“Let’s move on,” Haneyl said, eyes glowing green.

“Haneylhra…”

“Come on, just a bit more,” she purred. Her tongue was between Kuha’s legs, rubbing against her, tasting her. Despite everything, Kuha pushed up against it, letting it part her. The tongue eased into her, and despite everything it felt good. “I know you want your turn fucking me.” Her lower tongue spread Kuha, its bumps and hands rubbing up against her. The tendrils spread into her flesh, teasing her clit along its internal length. “I want you. It’ll feel good…”

“Haneylhyra, I’m… I’m tired. We’ve been at it for hours.” Kuha’s thighs twitched as blood rushed to her clit, but she gritted her teeth, scrambling away. Haneyl groaned in disappointment as Kuha let the tongue slip out of her. She rolled Haneyl off her, sitting up and bringing her knees up defensively. “Stop. I’m tired. It’s… gods, it’s past sunset. “Let’s just go to bed. And rest. We can fuck in the morning.”

“Am I not good enough? After everything?” Haneyl’s body trembled as she pulled herself onto all fours. Was it exhaustion? Anger? “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re not over her!”

“Gods of the north wind, give me strength!” Kuha snapped in her native language. She took a deep breath, and tried to think in Old Realm. It was too late for this! “It’s not about that!”

“You think I’m not as good as Calesco!” Haneyl’s veins were dark and bulging, not just on her breasts and inner thighs, but in her eyes. There was a new note to her scent; something sickly sweet. No. It wasn’t new. It might not have been there at first, but it had been growing and growing they longer they fucked. She crawled towards Kuha like a beast, breasts hanging freely, hair wild and nails lengthening. “Well, I’ll show you! I’m a better lover than her! You used to spend all day in bed with her! I can give you everything Rathan gives Oula!”

“Just shut up!” Kuha snapped back. The hair on the back of her neck rose. She was… she was starting to get scared. “If you’re going to be like that, I don’t want you.”

“Of course you do. After all, Calesco wasn’t enough for you, so…”

The sound of flesh on flesh had been a constant beat here, but this slap was different. Sharper. Haneyl scrambled back and collapsed onto her bottom, hand to her cheek.

“Get out!” Kuha snapped, eyes welling with tears. She pointed at the exit. “No! You don’t get to say something like that! I… I loved it when I was with her and I made a mistake because we didn’t talk about what she thought was going on compared to what I thought! How dare you say that! I… I… I still miss the soft times with her sometimes! I said you two were different! We’re just doing it for the fun! Without all the drama and… and the expectations she piled on everything! But right now I don’t want to see you!” A bubbling sob escaped from her throat. “This isn’t fun!” 

Haneyl’s face twisted into something ugly and not very human; muzzle lengthening, rows upon rows of teeth visible, a silver tear welling from the corners of one eye. Her hair smouldered, throwing off embers. She pulled herself upright, eyes wild and grabbed her discarded top, trying to wrestle it on and nearly falling over. With a snarl, she gave up trying to dress herself. She couldn’t find her skirt or panties, which were somewhere under the mat of flowers. 

“This is all your fault! Why did you have to go and ruin it because you’re thinking of her and not me? Aren't I good enough?” she shrieked, before stepping out into the night stark naked, tongue still flopping out of her drooling lower mouth. She stuck her head back in. “And you better give me back my fucking clothes!”

Kuha sagged down and cried into her knees, surrounded by flowers born of lust and the petrified remnants of the demon tree. Fuck. Fuck. This… this wasn’t her fault this time, but it still hurt.

Humans and lesser demons were much lower maintenance. And she missed Calescohyra.


	8. Chapter 8

The ground was cold and smooth and see-through. The sky was a city, painted by an artist who only had reds, blacks and whites. Rivers of something that was either blood or red water showed no regards for the canals of the inverted city, looping around the sparkling glass pathways that passed under the streets.

“Huh,” said Ney Adami. “I do believe I’m dreaming. And yet I’m aware that I’m dreaming.”

She pulled herself to her feet, glancing down at the clouds under the glass road with a shudder. In the spirit of experimentation, she spat over the edge. It fell down into the void of the pale pink sky below, away from the city overhead. Yep. Definitely a dream. Or a wyld-pocket. But given she didn’t remember wandering into one of the places where the world’s laws were thin, it was probably a dream.

She didn’t mind it too much. She had not been having a good week. Taym had been going on (and on and on and on) about things that really didn’t matter in any meaningful sense and didn’t trust Ney’s reports, Mashy hadn’t been around to take the edge off the boss’s paranoia, and on top of that she’d been feeling female but hadn’t been able to dress that way.

Looking down, she noticed immediately that she was dressed in a form-fitting version of her work clothes. And that she had curves. She poked herself in the chest experimentally. Huh. Real. She clutched her groin. Yep, definitely a woman’s body. This wasn’t entirely unheard of, because sometimes when she was feeling more female she’d dream herself into one of her disguises, but this felt… different. Her heart fluttered as she ran her hand through her short hair.

“Okay, okay, I really hope that whatever malicious spirit is up to this isn’t going to pull some kind of stupid trick,” Ney called out, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Because that would just be way more effort than it’s worth.”

Well, she didn’t like standing on a glass road like that. Sure, it might be as strong as the ancient roads, but she couldn’t be sure of that. She crouched, concentrating on her legs, then sprung up to the roof of the nearest building, hanging onto the tiles with her fingertips. Moving with the grace of a spider, she scuttled along the inverted roof and swung up onto a dragon-spout that protruded from the guttering. 

Interesting, she observed, knocking on the wall. The building was solid. It wasn’t a real building. It was just a solid block. Whatever had made this strange dream-world had been lazy. 

She didn’t have a thing against laziness, of course. It was a worthwhile endeavor. But it told her something about who had built this world, and that was that they didn’t expect her to do this. Or that they were trying to make her think that they didn’t expect her. 

When she put it like that...

Ney beamed, flashing white teeth at the trichrome world. “Hey, dream,” she called out. “This is my sleeping time, you know. It’s all a dream, so I think I’m just going to take a nap.” She casually leapt thirty metres across the void, catching the branches of a tree with one hand and swung herself into it. It was a broad-brimmed apple tree, the leaves as red as its fruit and its branches coal black. 

With insulting ease, Ney settled herself down on the boughs, and plucked an apple, tossing it up and down.

“Oi! Dream! Give me a pillow!”

It didn’t give her a pillow. Someone did shoot a crossbow at her, though. Which wasn’t the first time such a request had done such a thing for Ney, but it was still mildly surprising.

“Excuse me,” Ney said, looking at where the bolt had stuck in the wood. They hadn’t been aiming to hit her. “That’s a bolt, not a pillow. There’s a really big difference.”

Ah yes, the next bolt _was_ aimed at her. She grabbed the projectile from the air. Smoke rose from between her fingers, and she traced the fletching back to the window it had come from.

Ney moved, scrambling up the tree in erratic movements the eye found hard to follow. With a leap she was onto another wall, and bounding between them with no real care for gravity. She flickered, and then she was gone.

The crossbowman at the window wasn’t human. Their body was a strange thing that looked like black ribbons had been wrapped around an invisible man. There were holes in their form which revealed that there was nothing inside. And pinned to their back was a scrap of paper.

“Hey,” Ney said from directly behind them. She was leaning against the wall, arms crossed. “So, I asked for a pillow, not a crossbow bolt. Do you have superiors I can complain to?”

Rudely, they objected to her presence and tried to kill her. Naturally, Ney was disinclined to acquiesce to their request and instead pinned them to the wall, stabbing them with their own bolt. She yanked the note off them.

“A treasured oyster waits for you within a place of a forgotten heritage,” she read out loud. “Search for the market.” She pulled a face. “Really? Really? Dream, dream, dream, I’m very disappointed in you. This is meant to be my me-time. But here you are, making me get up to work-like activities when I’m asleep. Honestly, I’m shocked. Shocked.”

The whole building was also shocked, or at least trembled like an earthquake had hit. Ney figured she was probably annoying the entity in charge of the dream. Good to know. Things that could be annoyed could be put off their game. They were things she could play with. 

“La, la, I guess I’ll get to it. But this better be good,” she drawled.

* * *

In the upside-down city, lived upside-down people. They went around their upside-down lives quite happily, flocking through the streets doing all the things people did. If they were upside-down.

And also made of ribbons, rags, or other fabric-based materials.

They couldn’t speak. Or rather, when they spoke, they just made muffled noises like someone with their head in a bag. Ney had tried checking to see if there was anything under the cloth, but there was just stuffing. She’d felt slightly bad about that, right until the cloth-woman had mmmphed at her, sounding annoyed, and stitched her head back together with a needle and thread she pulled out of her pocket. So this was certainly following dream logic in some ways.

But there were the other ones - the ones who didn’t think that she’d seen them. Ney was letting them get away with that misapprehension, because it never did to let an enemy see all the cards in your hand. They were faces at windows, watchers standing on the undersides of roofs and at windows before vanishing into nowhere. 

Ney had already realised that quite obviously this city was based on a real place. It was too detailed and too full of things that didn’t really make sense for someone to design it from scratch. That pointless alleyway which went in half a room’s width before being cut off by a building was the kind of thing people built, but which no one building a city from scratch would ever do. This was nothing like Taym’s capital, which was all the product of a single mind building things in a tesselating grid structure. This city was madly organic in its growth, all jumbled together. It wasn’t that there was no sense to it. It was that the sense was only localised. They built bridges across the blood canals at inconvenient places, but they did it because there was a stockyard - where fabric cows mooed pitifully - blocking off the best route.

Things like that.

The traffic was getting denser, and the barges that sailed upside down on canals of blood were packed end-to-end. Ney followed the noise to something that could only be a market.

The inverted market was vast - bigger than the markets of Taym’s capital or Terema by an astonishing degree. Banners in many shades of red, black and white flapped in the breeze, while the collosal square was filled with many-levelled buildings where cloth people flocked and gathered. Fabric variants of almost anything someone would want to buy could be seen on the stalls, or carried by the thronging crowds. And that meant it could only be one place.

“The Little Market,” Ney read on the upside down sign. “Ah yes. The famous Nexan sense of humour.” She leapt over to one of the nearest buildings, scaling the wall before entering on the top, ground floor. It looked like a fish market, even if the fish were hand knitted. At least they didn’t smell.

Now, who’d make her a fake Nexus? Inside a dream? And then play silly games with her.

The world changed, cloth-people collapsing into yarn that pooled together and spooled up into seven figures. These were different from the scenery-people; two with snow-white skin, two with coal black, and three with blood red. They looked at her with faces covered by eyeless half-masks, and carried various brutal weapons. And they were obviously female. They wore very little - random wrappings of cloth around their limbs, figure-hugging silk dresses with strategic windows, and (Ney realised with a grin) no underwear.

As one, they dropped from above down to surround Ney. The figures moved like dancers. Even as they moved to circle her, it was like a choreographed routine. Machete-girl danced up to the girl with tiger-claws, sweeping her into a kiss, then together they turned their heads to stare at Ney. The whip-wielder cracked her whip, tearing the dress of the one with the tetsubo who audibly gasped in pleasure.

Ney couldn’t help but laugh. She’d suspected it, but - Ahlat, it was so obviously Kiss behind this. She was so vain, she couldn’t help but make the thugs look like her. The body shape and the perfect grace and posture couldn’t be mistaken. As well as the possibly-religious prohibition against underwear. 

And that meant she was just flirting. Well. Ney grinned. Time to flirt back. By beating them into the ground so she’d show her face. But stylishly.

“Hmm.” Ney stretched, joints clicking. “So. Can you talk? Or am I being attacked by mute sexy ladies in figure-hugging outfits?”

She got no response, but they did giggle. The one with the chain-spear reached out and grabbed the sai-girl, fondling her breasts and drawing loud and probably-fake moans of pleasure from her target.

“Well, in that case, I’m naming you.” Her index finger danced over the figures. “Chainy, Sai, Katana… oh, and I’m calling your sword-sister Mashy ‘cause she’s got a machete. And also because she reminds me of Mashy. Then we’ve got Subo… no, not you, Sai, I’m pointing at the one with the big club. Hmm. And then we can wrap things up with Whippy, and…” Ney considered the one with the tiger claws. “Yeah, you’re Leila Sara Yasamin Jaleh.”

The seven figures paused at what they were doing. Despite the fact that none of their outfits exposed their eyes, they glared at her.

“Look, Leila, try to explain things to them,” Ney suggested. “You’re their sister. They’ll understand. It’s not my fault you’re your mother’s favourite.”

Trading glances among themselves, the ribbon-women emoted an impressive degree of incredulity for eyeless masked assassins. Was this woman really, their looks seemed to say, taunting them _even further_ while already outnumbered seven-to-one and surrounded?

Ney grinned happily. This was a reaction she was used to, in her line of work.

“If you want me to give you a handicap-” she started, and this was apparently a bridge too far. Three figures leapt for her; two swords and a flashing pair of claws seeking her blood. Even as Katana, Mashy and Leila moved in close, Subo and Chainy were flanking her - no, not flanking! Parrying the machete, turning aside a claw and ducking the point of the katana, Ney leapt away in a great bounding jump as the great club smashed through the glass bridge on one side of her, and the serpentine chains of the spear wrapped around it on the other; pulling tight and shattering it apart.

With a deceptively slow motion, the entire section of glass bridge she’d been standing on fell down into the bottomless pink sky. It carried the three red fighters into the sky - but, of course, they leapt from the doomed fragment and traded gravities; falling back up towards the city.

That was a mistake. In the air, there was nothing for them to push off with that peerless agility. Without an instant of hesitation, Ney hurled herself off the edge of the path she’d landed on; avoiding the lash of the whip to plummet towards the trio.

Credit where credit was due. Even caught by surprise and with no traction or mobility, Katana _nearly_ managed to twist out of the way before Ney could collide with her; aiming to leave her plummeting towards the clouds without any hope. But even Keris could only do so much with momentum. Ney crashed into her, feet against knees, and they halted improbably in mid-air - one pulled up, the other pulled down. For a few seconds, they traded a vicious flurry of blows; feinting and deflecting with their swords even as Katana tried to throw her off and Ney kept her feet on her target’s centre mass.

Unfortunately for Katana, Kiss was a spear girl, not a swordswoman. And up-close and personal like this; Ney’s short blade was quicker than the long curved line of the sword. Two deflections and a deliberate hole in her guard let Ney sneak a lethal blow through, and red ribbons spilled out of Katana’s throat and unfurled in a sudden wind.

Ney flipped away from the red-skinned assassin, but not without cost. The silver edge of the katana had cut across her waist in the blow she’d let through, tearing the cloth and revealing dark flesh underneath. Her rent shirt flapped as she launched herself up towards Mashy - also still in the air and vulnerable. This time, her target knew what she was doing. Instead of trying to contort herself out of the way, Mashy met her blade-for-blade, winding up and telegraphing a devastating slash with her broader, longer blade while Ney was still in the air and couldn’t exploit the opening. And without any traction to alter her own jump, she couldn’t dodge it, either.

So instead, she parried it, gritting her teeth against the vibration that ran up her arm and the cracks that spread through her short sword. It was fine. This still worked for her. Where she’d been falling down towards Katana, she’d jumped up towards Mashy - and that meant the sky was below her, with no convenient (if adorably murderous) platform.

Ney’s other hand snapped forward and locked around Mashy’s wrist. Again they halted; suspended by conflicting gravities. Mashy kicked, Ney deflected, they struggled for a moment as Mashy tossed her blade from one hand to the other, ready to bring it down on Ney’s own arm...

... and then Ney pulled her feet up and drop-kicked her in the face.

She wasn’t expecting that. The short blade flashed, and another plume of crimson ribbons billowed out on an unseen wind. Ney hurtled up from the disintegrating body, one of her sleeves falling away into the sky, and landed on an unbroken glass bridge below the marketplace.

Five blank half-masks regarded her from their perches nearby. Leila crouched on the underside of a bridge; legs spread enough to hint at what was under the dress. The white-skinned pair; Sai and Whippy, leaned back against one another with arched backs and tilted hips, while ink-black Subo had Chainy in a possessive embrace.

This time, Ney was the one to spring. Not towards them on the glass roads, but _up_, into the marketplace that hung from the cobblestones of the city. Hooking an arm around a stall post and flipping acrobatically past the retort of Chainy’s spear gouging a chunk out of it, Ney aimed herself towards a large network of covered stalls. They offered just enough space that she wouldn’t bash her head on the cobbles, and the cloth overhangings that served as roofs would give her footing. In a closed, messy environment like that; Kiss’s puppets would find it much harder to catch her.

But this time, her jump cost her. She almost made it, until Whippy’s lash twisted in the air like a snake and wrapped around her ankle, yanking her back down to crash into the jutting bars of a signpost. Before she could get her foot free, Chainy added her own weapon to the fray; the spearhead slicing effortlessly through her belt as the cold chains wrapped around her legs and bound her to the lamppost. Ney flipped her sword around to cut herself free, but Sai was there before she could; standing on the inverted ground again with her head level with Ney’s; locking her blade between the prongs and _twisting_...

“Aww,” Ney complained sadly as the fractured metal gave up under the strain and snapped. “I liked that sword. Really, Sai, you just have no idea how to treat a girl.”

The white-haired killer hissed at her - hissing, that was new - but Ney had got her measure now. If they were here to kill her, Chainy’s spearhead would have sunk into her ribs instead of just tying her up, or Sai would have stabbed her by now. Kiss had shown her hand - and she didn’t have the cards she was pretending to. And the fact that Sai’s hair was sliding under her clothes to fondle her was sort of giving the game away too.

Grinning impishly, Ney leaned forward as far as she could between the two binding weapons holding her tethered to the lamppost and kissed Sai on the lips.

It surprised her just enough for Ney to get her hands free and pivot her into the path of Subo’s club. The stolen sai flashed out even the crushing blow hit the wrong target, and buried itself in Subo’s throat. Her flailing hand grasped at what was left of Ney’s shirt, but it didn’t help her as she fell; tearing away the already-damaged fabric.

Two sets of ribbons - one white, one black - drifted away on the wind. Casually shrugging her way out of the restraints, Ney watched them flutter off into the distance. Four down, three to go - and one of each colour left, too! Maybe she should start a collection.

Perched on her lamppost, breathing hard, Ney watched as they dropped up to the ground and circled her. Pale-skinned Whippy’s lash twitched and twisted like a snake, Chainy’s many-part spear coiled around her coal-dark form and Leila’s claws reflected her sanguine hue where they glinted in the light. Slowly, slowly, the circle tightened - but never too much. They were wary of her now. They knew how good she was.

Too bad it wouldn’t help them.

The assault, when it came, was devastating. Whippy and Chainy had evidently decided that restricting Ney’s movement wasn’t going to work, and instead opened up with a volley of furious blows that made full use of their weapons’ reach and speed. The air cracked as Whippy’s lash tore through it, ripping up stalls and hurling them around, while Chainy’s spear cut through the base of the lamppost and filled the air with a battering storm of chain-segments. Ney ducked and weaved, hopping from foothold to foodhold amidst the onslaught and using the weapons themselves to work her way towards the canvas awnings of the stall complex.

Leila’s kidney shot from behind almost connected. As it was, it forced her to dodge into the tongue of a whip-crack that tore away one of her leggings from the thigh down. Ney watched - mildly impressed - as Leila’s sisters curved their attacks around her; giving her cover and openings at the same time while forcing Ney onto the defensive.

Well now. That couldn’t stand.

With a burst of speed, she flickered, and was in front of Whippy. Her blade was gone, and she’d spent her stolen sai on Subo, so she resorted to a flurry of joint and nerve strikes to take the assassin down; pummelling her from inside her guard until whatever magic held her together broke and she came apart in a shower of white ribbons. Then it was _duck_ to avoid Leila’s murderous lunge at her back - what was _with_ that girl and trying to stab her in the back? - and flicker again towards Chainy.

Who responded by pulling her weapon back into a whirling dome of bludgeoning spear-segments around herself. Ney laughed, scuttling like a spider along the cobbles.

“Not bad, but adjust your hold on the weapon. And you’re making yourself immobile,” she suggested in her most annoyingly helpful tone. She had practiced that tone well. Her trainees for the Blades would get better out of sheer annoyance at being told that she was sure they were trying their best.

Clinging to the grooves between cobblestones, she kicked up a trestle table and sent it flying towards the whirling chain-spear defensive dome. It broke apart into pieces, but she simply flickered again to stay ahead of Leila and followed it up with another - and another, and another, until the hail of splinters and wood fragments clogged the links of the chain and opened gaps in the impenetrable defence. Then, with one last flicker, Ney was there with a table leg in hand, bringing it around in a scything blow to the head that segued perfectly into grabbing Chainy by the back of the head and bringing her face down onto Ney’s knee for good measure.

She didn’t _intend_ for the puppet’s head to glance off sideways and end up buried in her crotch, so that was probably deliberate on Chainy’s part. It got a squawk out of Ney, at least - she was already missing most of her clothes. Perhaps she was maybe even starting to feel a little heated from some of the touches and caresses she’d got while tied up. Leaping away as the black ribbons lost cohesion, she landed lightly on an intact glass road and turned to her last opponent.

Leila Sara Yasamin Jaleh did not look happy about the loss of her friends. She demonstrated this by lunging for Ney’s throat; tiger claws slashing wildly as she closed the distance. Against most people, it would have been an intimidating assault.

Ney wasn’t most people.

“Look, Lei-lei,” she drawled, catching both blood-red hands and pulling Leila close. She immediately had to cant her hips to avoid to knee to the groin, but that just let her flow into a spin and let go of one hand to twirl Leila around; turning deadly murder into dancing.

“You’re trying, I know,” she continued, “and don’t get me wrong! You’re good! But you’re not Kiss. And that means that, while you’re very sexy and impressive...”

An attempt to headbutt her got diverted into her shoulder for an intimate swaying embrace, then Ney had to shift back to avoid an elbow strike and twirl her again. Leila was trying to stamp on her foot, but that wasn’t just expected, it let her show off her fancy dancing footwork. Well, sort of. This probably wasn’t the kind of dance Mashy would want at one of her parties.

“... you just don’t have a chance against me,” Ney finished smugly, and leaned back from one last attempt to _bite_ her before darting in for a kiss. While Leila went rigid with homicidal indignation, Ney sneaked one hand up to her shoulder, found the right spot, pinched and applied pressure, aaaaand...

Leila folded up like a rag doll, and dropped soundlessly to the glass surface of the road. The ambient sounds of the still-populated bits of the market halted for a moment, and then grew louder and more discordant; as if the world itself was angry.

“Oh, don’t get so upset, Kiss,” Ney grinned. “It was just a nerve pinch to knock her out. Nothing to worry about.”

The ground rumbled. A whining reverb hummed from the glass bridges, and distant thunder growled from the pink skies below.

“Well yes, something made of cloth and ribbons shouldn’t really have nerves; I’ll give you that,” Ney agreed cheerfully. “But, have you considered that maybe I’m just that good?”

Going by the short, sudden shower of glass hail, Kiss had not considered that. And didn’t appreciate the suggestion. Crouching down on the bridge to avoid the tinkling rain of sharp shards falling upwards from below, Ney glanced around to take stock.

The damage to the market had left its mark. Oh, not just in the usual way of such things; overturned carts, scattered vegetables, and torn awnings. No, the damage had fallen by seemingly random chance, and now in ruined fruit and damaged walls, Ney could see the pattern. It said;

LOOK FOR WHERE SHE SLEPT. WANDER INTO THE FIRE.

Yeah, no thanks, Ney quite firmly decided. She didn’t mind investigating mysteries, but she drew the line at being led around by the nose. So, she wasn’t going to follow these stupid rules.

She turned the corner and was gone in the eyes of all onlookers.

* * *

The spider at the heart of this dreaming world was none too happy. Her prey had escaped her. Eyes closed, Keris sprawled back on the luxurious bed she had dreamed into being, and scowled as walls across this false city opened eyes, looking for Ney.

This was so like him! Or her, or… so like Ney! This was entirely, one hundred percent Ney! Keris had had a plan! A wonderful, sexy plan, where Ney got run ragged both figuratively and very, very literally. There had been more attacks by beautiful, scantily clad cloth-puppets! There had been more and more clues, each one more and more obtuse! There had been an attack by clothes-eating butterflies! By the time Ney had found her, she should have been naked, sweaty, and ready to fall into Keris’s bed!

But she was nowhere to be found!

Keris flickered her attention down Whalebone Lane, up Potter’s Street and along Blossom Street - but there was no sign of Ney! Okay. Okay. Think. Think. Where would she be if she were Ney? She’d revealed the Firewander clue, so probably somewhere around there... urgh, but Ney was so damn sneaky! It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair!

She was knocked out of her sulk by the smoky explosion that scattered her pleasant fripperies, tossed her cushions aside, and knocked her off the bed. Swearing sulphurously in three languages, Keris pulled herself upright.

“Hey, Kiss,” Ney said, standing in the smoking hole that had once been part of the wall. She gave her a little finger-waggling wave. “You know, it’s not very nice to trap people in a dream world.”

“I… what are you doing there? How… there was meant to be a trail! Of clues! My clues! Why didn’t you follow them?”

“Yeah, I know.” She shrugged. “I got bored so thought I’d just skip to the end. Thanks for the firedust. It made getting through the wall way easier.”

“I didn’t put firedust here! I know because I dreamed this whole place into being! And there was not one pinch of firedust!”

“Huh.” Ney looked at the rubble. “How did I blow a hole in the wall, then?” Like an asshole, she seemed genuinely confused.

“I don’t know! I lost track of you, you annoying, annoying…” Keris looked her up and down, “... brat!”

“So basically what you’re saying is that you can’t disprove I used firedust, the blast is characteristic of firedust, and I claim I used firedust.” Ney shrugged, her rags and tatters shifting interestingly. “I dunno, Kiss. Circumstantial evidence is looking pretty clear.”

Keris looked Ney up and down, getting the first real look at this dreamed-up female self through her own eyes. She had examined her through the senses of her dream body, but that wasn’t quite the same. And of course, now there was so much more Ney visible through the torn cloth. She was very similar to how Ney’s disguise had looked in Malra - tall and slender, with dusky skin barely any darker than Keris’s own and short-cropped black. Now, though, Keris could see more of her, and there were subtle differences - her shoulders not quite as broad, her breasts a little smaller and with darker nipples. She was toned with the all-over musculature of a generalist; someone who didn’t specialise in one particular field of athletic prowess, but instead just used every muscle in her body on a regular basis. Well-defined muscles moved under a soft layer of fat that rounded her hips and softened her silhouette, and Keris could see the power in her long, shapely legs.

Though, she thought smugly. Ney probably didn’t have quite as much force behind her kicks as Keris, given all the swimming she did down in the Southwest - even if Ney certainly had her beat on upper body strength. That was good to know.

“Circumstantial evidence,” she said, dragging her attention away from Ney’s body and back to her smirking face, “can go hang off a drain. I did not put any firedust in this city! You must’ve... must’ve done some annoying sunlight trick to mimic it! Or forced the dream to make some, somehow!” She scowled. “You are _ruining_ my _narrative_. And you still haven’t apologised for coming straight here! How did you even know where here was? You’ve never been to Nexus!” She paused, checking outside with her dream-body’s eyes as a thought occurred to her. “Also, this place is still surrounded by flying blades! How did you get through _them?”_

“Kiss, darling,” Ney said with an easy shrug. “They were only knives. Even a baby can run on knives.” She grinned. “Well, your babies, at least. How is my little super-apprentice huntress?”

“_Kali_... is fine, if you must know,” Keris sighed. Urgh. She knew Ney was playing her by getting her to talk about her babies... but they were so cute! Even if they were being brats at the moment. “She and Ogin are walking and talking now - and causing mischief,” she groaned. “_So much_ mischief. They’ve been getting into things - ugh, just before I came here they both got into some kind of goo and then the flour stocks and wound up coated in bready white paste that wouldn’t come off at _all_ \- and I still have no idea what the goo was.” She sighed, then looked up sharply. “And Ahkmi? I hope you’ve been taking good care of them! I trusted you to look after them; so I better not hear that your priestess or the naib did anything horrible.”

“Excuse me, my other super-apprentice is doing very nicely.” Ney frowned. “Turned into being made out of flowers, but I appreciate the hot meals. So all’s well that ends well.”

Keris considered this, and mentally listed things that might make a mez shift breed into a szirom. “You were being lazy and not doing your paperwork or eating enough,” she concluded. “So Ahkmi started writing things down and cooking for you. Ass.”

“Oh Kiss, we’re made to be together!” Ney said with a florid hand gesture that lost her most of her already limited modesty as her tattered clothes gave way. “We’re so alike!”

Keris stared - both at the nudity and the audacity - and what little reserve she had left gave out. “Oh... shut up,” she snarled, and lunged forward with a kiss.


	9. Chapter 9

Of course, it wasn’t as easy as just lunging forward and kissing her. Ney was still _infuriatingly fast_, and jumped out of the way with a casual kick off the floor; hands hooked over the shredded strands of fabric still hanging around her hips as though they were a belt. “La, la, Kiss,” she drawled. “I know you’re eager to have your wicked way with me again, but I’m not that easy a girl to get your hands on.” She ducked another lunge and flicker-stepped over to the other side of the room, grinning. “Maybe I want to be wined and dined first! I remember feeding _you_ on our dates back in Malra, but all you’ve given me is masked assassins and firedust.”

Grinding her teeth, Keris called on a fraction of Vali’s speed and cleared the room with a thunderous crack, hitting Ney in mid-dodge and sending them careening through an embroidered curtain into a wall. 

Wrists pinned against the silken wall hanging in a vice grip, Ney still had the cheek to grin. “Actually, you’ve been very mean to me the whole time I’ve been here,” she taunted. “Hurt, Kiss. I’m hurt. Maybe I should change your nickname to ‘Kill’?”

“Merciful _silence_, do you ever shut up?” growled Keris, tightening her grip. But then Ney’s foot was sliding behind hers and tripping her backwards, and she caught a flash of a white-toothed grin as the taller woman broke her grip by yanking her hands in and back. Well, the hell with that! No way was Keris letting the infuriating _asshole_ get the upper hand now! And they were in grappling range, so the advantage was _hers_.

Credit where credit was due; Ney wasn’t stupid. One hand immediately went for Keris’s hair, trying to grab it and loop it around her arm to keep it out of the fight, while the other tried to lock Keris’s own wrists together behind her back. But there was too much hair to contain, and at this range Ney’s reach advantage meant nothing, and Keris was inhumanly double-jointed and flexible besides. Hissing with mocking laughter, she ducked out of a spirited attempt to use her smaller bodyweight against her, slid around Ney’s side, and had her arms and legs bound up in hair tendrils before she could blink.

A powerful kick to the wall sent them stumbling forward, a hair tendril swept aside another curtain, and they hit the bed with a _thump_; face-down with Keris victorious on top of her immobilised prey.

“I have complaints about your guided tour, too,” the brat said cheerfully; muffled against the covers. “I was a lot nicer when I showed you around Malra.”

Keris growled. Her red-and-gold dress - already hemmed shorter than she usually had it - had ridden up in the fight, and Ney hadn’t been wearing much to begin with. Now, as she straddled the bigger woman to keep her pinned to the bed, her pussy was pressed right up against the small of Ney’s back, and like a complete _prick_, Ney was flexing distractingly to throw her off her game.

“Stop that,” she ordered huskily, winding her hair tighter around Ney’s limbs, sliding locks around her stomach and tracing snake-like paths up her sides; wrapping her up like a spider cocooning her prey. “Give that mouth a rest and let me look at you, pretty thing.”

Oh, now that worked. Ney tried to hide it, but her breath hitched a little at the compliment - or maybe at the feeling of being swaddled and held so safe and tight. Keris smirked, tickling the short-cropped hair at the base of her skull; playing her fingers back and forth across the back of her neck. She felt Ney open her mouth for another flippant retort; was waiting for it - and popped a ball of hair into her mouth as an improvised gag.

“There now,” she crooned, rolling her prize over to admire her. Ney wasn’t wholly engulfed, or invisible under the hair - rather, Keris had trussed her up like one of those erotic rope-harnesses Sasi occasionally wore as a treat. Thick bands of hair wrapped around her torso in a double-looped pattern that framed and presented her breasts, while her arms had been reeled in behind her and folded behind her back. The gag encircled her face from the nose down; letting her breathe while denying any hope of spitting it out - and if she tried to bite through it; she’d find that Keris’s hair was as tough as steel wire.

Not that she had. In fact, she was being remarkably pliant and obedient; staring up at Keris with those big brown eyes.

“Pretty, pretty girl,” Keris murmured; trailing her fingers down from Ney’s collarbone over the swell of a breast and a taut stomach to her inner thigh, fluttering her touch tantalisingly just out of reach of her lower lips. “All wrapped up for me like a present. You’re gorgeous like this, you know that?”

Ney made a little sound; a shuddering gasp, and Keris smirked. There was less gloating behind it, though - she could feel the fondness in her expression. “I never asked before,” she whispered. “What do you want me to call you? Girl? Boy? He? She? They?”

She bent closer to plant a kiss on the collarbone where she’d first touched. “Or maybe you wouldn’t like me to call you anything at all,” she whispered. “Maybe you’d just like me to make you scream.”

Ney’s eyelids fluttered, and she nodded dazedly. Keris smiled sweetly. For all that the bickering and sparring was fun, she really liked this Ney - the one who’d been wide-eyed and captivated as she’d stripped him down to take measurements for his dress, the night before she hit the naib’s fortress. “Well, you can tell me later,” she shrugs. “For now...” her fingers walked up again. “I think I’ll tell you all the sinful, sexy things I’m going to do to you.”

That, apparently, was too much of an open invitation for Ney to pass up, and she waggled her eyebrows ridiculously. Keris rolled her eyes, and dropped down to prop herself up on her elbows just above Ney’s face; feeling their breasts brush against each other and the hot flutter of Ney’s breathing on her collarbone.

“First,” she murmured, “I’m going to spend some time on your legs. Do you like them like this? All sleek and smooth? I can paint your toes all pretty,” again, that hitched gasp, “and kiss my way up to your thighs. Tickle you behind your knees - are you ticklish there?” She ground forward, hooking a leg behind Ney’s, drawing it up and feeling the drag of skin against skin; the way Ney’s thighs bulged slightly where the hair-binds were drawn tight. “I’ll spend a while finding out. Then I can keep going... but not where you want me, hmm?”

Delicately, she reached down and dragged a finger slowly through wet folds, along with a high-pitched moan from Ney and a full-body tremble. She rubbed her fingers together assessingly - slick, but not slick enough yet - then stuck them in her mouth and sucked on the taste of aroused girl, humming appreciatively and fluttering her eyelashes for Ney to see.

“You taste good,” she whispered, ducking down to breathe it directly into Ney’s ear. “Promising for later, hmm?” She laughed as Ney’s hips bucked, and forced her down again with a knee across her thigh. “But I’ve barely started, sweetheart. I’ve only just got to your hips, mmm...”

Running her hands over Ney’s hips, up and down and up again, Keris hummed happily at the firm muscles there. Ney didn’t have the hourglass figure Sasi had; her curves were thin fat over muscle rather than generous plump softness. But her hips were still wide enough to put a delightful sway in her step, and her ass was deliciously firm when Keris squeezed it. She grinned as Ney fluttered her eyes reproachfully and waggled her eyebrows again.

“You like being curvy, don’t you?” she teased. “When you’re a boy you just go straight up and down. And that has its perks, but like this...”

Red hair shifted across brown skin; the knots and loops shifting, and Keris dragged her hands back up again; over her hips and up to her breasts. “Such pretty curves,” she breathed. “So _soft_ and _squeezable_.”

Ney’s eyes creased in a grin. And then, somehow, she worked her jaw a little, stuck her tongue out into the hair-gag to shift it, shimmied her neck, and popped the entire thing out and down onto her neck. Keris blinked in surprise. That had been tightly secured! She’d been _holding Ney’s mouth shut_, how...

“I like to think I’m gorgeously toned, actually,” Ney smiled smugly up at her. “And while I’m enjoying the flattery, Kiss - and really, who could argue with how good I look? - you’ve been talking so long I’m starting to get worried you don’t know what to do with me.”

Keris stared down at her. Ney grinned up. A moment passed.

Then Keris’s eyes narrowed, and she bent her head to Ney’s breast and _bit_, scraping her teeth around the deep brown areola and sucking just hard enough to flirt with the edge of pain.

Ney’s choked gasp and quiet curse was gratifyingly surprised. Lifting her head with a wicked smirk and opening mouths in both palms to continue her assault, Keris applied more of her weight to pressing Ney down into the mattress.

“If you want me to _do things_ to you, my pretty,” she growled, “you only had to ask.”

“W-whoa,” Ney yelped, thrashing. “What?”

Keris pulled back, frowning. “Are you okay? Oh! Right, yeah.” She lifted a hand with a toothless maw in it; prehensile tongue licking its soft lips. “I can do this,” she grinned, then looked concerned. “Is that a problem for you? I can close them up if you want me to.”

Ney blinked at her for a moment, then shrugged it off and grinned. “Nah, don’t worry about it, Kiss,” she said easily. “It was just a surprise. But if you want to let your hands do the talking, who am I to stop you?”

Keris stared flatly at her for a few seconds. Then - since it was a choice between that and strangling the brat - she went back to applying teeth, lips and tongue as viciously as possible to the task of drawing out a series of ever-louder moans and squirming, painting a chain of flushed red bruises around Ney’s neck, and tasting the delicious flavour of arousal in her sweat and her skin. A hair tendril dipped low and wound its way up her thigh, teasing her labia apart and tracing lightly around her clit.

“Is this better?” Keris purred. “You like this? You want more?” It was a rhetorical question - she could hear the speeding of Ney’s heart, feel the slick heat soaking her hair and the involuntary bucking of Ney’s hips as she tried to get more pressure. But she still waited for the frantic nod before licking her way up the curve of Ney’s jaw and taking her bottom lip between her teeth. Slowly and carefully, hands and tongues still busy with Ney’s breasts, Keris pressed into tight wet heat with a finger-thin braid.

Ney’s breathing hitched. Keris smirked.

“Is that good, pretty?” she crooned into Ney’s mouth, drawing out a little and then pushing in further, twisting and curling in a way no mortal cock could; her braid unravelling to massage Ney’s inner walls with dexterity beyond what fingers were capable of. “You want it deeper? Thicker? Just say...”

She paused, frowning. _That_ hitch hadn’t been a good one. It wasn’t pain, but it certainly wasn’t pleasure. Pulling out to tease Ney’s opening again, Keris stopped assaulting her breasts and reached up to cup her face.

“Hey,” she murmured. “Hey, honey, talk to me. What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Mmm...” Ney grimaced slightly. “I don’t think that’s really my thing, that. No offense to your magic hair, Kiss, it just...”

“That’s fine,” Keris reassured her. “That’s okay, you don’t have to like it. Here, let me try this instead...”

Shifting in place, she slotted her thigh up between Ney’s and pressed upwards, slow and steady, tensing her leg to give a firm surface to grind into Ney’s pussy. It earned her a full-body shiver and an involuntary moan, settling her fears. Right then. No penetration, but grinding was still okay. And Ney had liked her teasing her vulva and clit, too. She could work with that.

Holding Ney close and sucking possessive bruises into her neck, Keris let her grind her pussy forward; little murmurs and gasps coming with every press of her hips. Opening a mouth on her thigh, she applied its rough tongue to Ney’s vulva and clit, while her fingers became root-fingers that sunk into Ney’s back and slipped between them to stimulate her clit from the inside. Lilunu had taught Keris to use needles for this - but who needed needles when you could coax open the sacral chakra with flesh-weaving tendrils and stimulate nerve clusters all along the spine with gentle pressure?

Keris might be doing this with praise and pleasure, but she was still merciless in driving Ney to the peak. Every point she pressed, every stroke and tap and tug within Ney’s flesh, sent bursts of shocking pleasure up her hindbrain and down to her clit. Every time her hands shifted position, it was to somewhere even more sensitive. Ney’s disguises were very good, but they weren’t the real thing - and that meant Ney had no experience with what her female body could feel like. Driving her from moans to gasps to high-pitched cries as Keris teased her nipples to aching hardness and drew roots along the length of her clit that hid under the surface wasn’t just for her pleasure - it was satisfying as hell hearing her smart mouth subverted for once.

“Kiss,” Ney begged, panting. “Kiss, come on, stop- ah! Kiss! Kisskisskisskisskiss, just...”

“My _name_, sweetness,” Keris whispered to her, hyper-alert to the sounds of her body as she bucked and writhed and ground up against Keris’s tongue and thigh and lips; undone by the flashes and bursts of ecstasy cascading through her. She was getting close - in fact, if not for Keris blocking off a few nerve impulses and carefully controlling her sacral chakra, she would already have climaxed. She had a few more seconds, and for what she was planning she’d have to time this _perfectly_...

“Keris!” Ney shouted, and Keris jerked her thigh up and along, thumbed her clit and _twisted_ her sacral chakra.

The rising scream cut off and reversed direction into a keening gasp, and Ney’s whole body arched like a strung bow; every muscle tensing. The orgasm that would normally have been over in seconds - already bone-shaking from how far Keris had teased and worked her up - was trapped in her clit; drawn out and prolonged and intensified. Keris watched in wonder as tears trickled down Ney’s cheeks at the intensity, at how her body rolled and writhed within its crimson bonds as she rode out the waves, as her mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

For long, long seconds - almost a minute, by Keris’s count - Ney shook from the force of the climax, her movements getting weaker and smaller as she went. Finally, she let out a great shuddering breath and went limp. Keris let her lay there for a while, gently untangling her hair from around her limbs and torso and shifting her off the drenched patch on the bed with all the delicate care she took with Atiya.

After another couple of minutes where Ney didn’t move or even open her eyes, she started getting worried.

“Ney?” she prompted, whisper-soft. “Ney, sweetheart. Are you there? Come on, give me something to go on here.” She paused, wincing. “Please tell me I didn’t break you. Because on the one hand that would be really boast-worthy, but on the other...”

A tiny murmur emerged from Ney’s parted lips, and Keris sagged in relief. “There you are,” she breathed. “How are you feeling?”

Ney shifted slightly. Her eyelashes fluttered, and a breathy murmur escaped. Keris grinned down at her.

“Too worn out to talk?” she teased. “Poor sweet darling. Did I wear you out?”

“Mmmn...” mumbled Ney, wriggling on the bed, limbs still splayed out like a lazy cat. She blinked slowly a few times, before settling into a dreamy, half-lidded look up at Keris. She looked sated, savaged and thoroughly sexed; bruises blooming up the side of her neck and hair mussed. Sweat beaded on her skin, and her lips were swollen from being bitten - both by her and by Keris.

“Ne~eey,” Keris cooed again. “You still haven’t given me any words. Please, sweetheart? How about just three, like... ‘you win, Kiss’.” She smirked. “See? I’ll even let you use that annoying nickname. Aren’t I generous?”

Ney blinked slowly again, her sex-dazed smile slipping into something a little more alert. She studied Keris intently for a moment.

And then, with a sudden powerful jerk of her hips, she flipped them. Keris yelped as she suddenly found herself pinned down, lashed her hair to regain the upper hand... and yelped again at the pain that bloomed on her scalp in response.

“Wha-” she sputtered, looking up as best she could. Red locks twined around the elaborate bedposts in two complex, arcane, pretty and most of all _sturdy_ knots. Somehow, she realised, Ney had tied her hair to the bed. She had _tied Keris’s hair to the bed, while she was using it, without her noticing_. And now she was smirking down at her smugly, hands locked around Keris’s wrists, hips flush over Keris’s, pinning her down with leverage and bodyweight.

“When did you-” Keris managed, torn between being stunned, furious and a very little bit reluctantly impressed. “_How_ did you...?” She gasped as their vulvas brushed over each other, Ney’s wet heat sinking into her.

“You want those three words now?” Ney grinned. “Alright then; ‘I win, Kiss’.” She beamed, looking very proud of herself.


	10. Chapter 10

Keris glared impotently up at her lover. Her face flushed with anger - and also desire. Ney’s strong arms were turning her on, despite herself. “Let me go,” she growled. “Or when I’ll get free I’ll- hey!” Her threat cut off halfway through and turned into a yelp as Ney’s clever, calloused fingers reached down and stroked, teasing and rubbing in ways that made Keris’s hands fist in the sheets and her hips jerk reflexively.

“Q-quit it!” she insisted, rather more breathily, which at least got a grinning Ney to still her fingers. “I’m n-not gonna just...” Her hair tightened around the bedposts and started to clench and pull. Groaning protests started to come from the metal as the inhuman strength of Keris’s body won out over the material.

“Ah ah ah,” Ney sang, retrieving her hand to wag it chidingly. She’d shifted the other to pin both of Keris’s wrists above her head, and squeezed to remind her of its presence. “Now now, Kiss. You worked me over, so it’s my turn to show you a good time. You have to respect the rules here; no cutting in line for your next go. Or,” she smirked, “are you saying you don’t think you can take what you can dish out?”

Keris glared feral murder up at her. But despite the palpable weight of indignation, her bunched hair sulkily relaxed, and she stopped trying to roll Ney off her hips.

“... like you _could_ show me a good time,” she grumbled. “Not nearly as good as what I did for you, anyway.”

“Probably not,” Ney agreed cheerfully, peppering a few kisses across Keris’s cheeks. “So why don’t you help this fumbling, inexperienced maiden out by doing your cats-eye thing that makes you feel things more? After all, it’s only fair that you get to feel as good as I did.” She winked, and Keris felt her lips twitching against her will. She _knew_ Ney was playing her, dammit. She knew it, but the brat was being infuriatingly cheerful and funny about it, and deliberately playing to Keris’s sense of tit-for-tat, and _why was it so hard to stay mad at her?_

“Kiiiiiiiiss~” sing-songed Ney. “Are you going to help me out? Or are you chickening out? There’s no shame in it, I’m-”

“Hush!” Keris snapped, slit-eyed and already trembling just from the sweat-slick heat of Ney on top of her. Everything was magnified a dozen times. The silk sheets were like water against her back, with smooth friction that sent little lightning bolts dancing up her spine. Ney’s weight on her felt _offensively_ good - not so heavy as to crush her, just enough to press her back firmly into the mattress and set a burn in her muscles from pushing up against it. And those _fingers_ were moving again, and if it had felt good before then now it was like fire. Slick and slippery and so, so good; pressing into her and spreading her and finding all the sweet spots like Ney had them memorised - urgh, she probably _did_, the asshole-

Ney pulled away, and Keris screamed in frustration.

“No!” she snarled. “Put them _back_, keep... fuck, keep _going!_ Get on with it and fuck me!”

“La, la,” Ney teased. “Maybe my fingers are getting tired now?” 

“I don’t need fingers!” Keris growled, grabbing her wrist with her hand - and just the feeling of Ney’s skin alone was almost too much. “Give me cock! Fuck me!”

Ney leaned back. “And I’m not feeling male right now.” She looked down at Keris, who let out a thin keen from the back of her throat and thrust her hips up at her. “It’s not something I can just turn on and off.” 

“But I want diiiiiick!” Keris wailed, sounding as bratty as Ney had been earlier.

“You’re not going to get any from me, Kiss.” Ney grinned with a hint of wickedness. “I mean, I think so. Maybe I might feel different later. But it mostly works with the moon.”

Keris stared around wildly. “If you want me to dream up a moon,” she began, words spilling over themselves, but what she had about to say was lost when Ney dragged a knotted rope of Keris’s own hair up against her lower lips. Her gasp turned into a yelp when Ney leaned in and nuzzled Keris’s armpit, running her tongue against the corded strength that made up its outside. She melted gooily into the bed, all her muscles going limp.

“Oh, so you’re one of those girls,” Ney murmured, already close to her ear. 

“What’s that ‘posed to mean?”

“I don’t need to explain everything,” Ney said, shifting to the hollow of Keris’s neck as she dragged the knotted hair against her. Each bump was a red-hot bolt into Keris’s mind, something that had her breath escape her in gasps and moans - and the erratic, unpredictable way that Ney shifted her tongue’s attentions was somehow making it worse.

“Neeeeeeey…”

“Oh, look, what’s this?” Ney let go of the hair-rope, stroking her hand up Keris’s body, lingering and toying as it took her whimsy. Her long fingers came to rest just behind Keris’s ears. “You didn’t clean up for me. You dirty girl.” Keris whimpered at that, and Ney just beamed more widely. “Look what’s behind your ear?”

Keris could hear the little sizzle of sunlight, but wasn’t in much of a state to think what it meant. She turned bright red, though, as Ney withdrew something which definitely hadn’t been behind her ear. Something horrifyingly, mortifyingly, embarrassingly familiar. 

“Now,” Ney purred, “why would the market-stalls in this dream world be selling dildos made out of a strange black stone that are, if I’m not really mistaken, based on me?”

Her blush was something physical. The heat of her own skin and the sudden sweat rolled over Keris, and only managed to turn her on more. “I’ve… n-n-never seen that before?” she tried, something that wasn’t meant to be a question but turned into one. “H-how did you get it?”

“Like I said, Kiss, I stole it from the market. Just like I stole the firedust. One is used to get everything hot and inflamed… and the other is firedust.” Ney sat up, perching on Keris’s hips. A groan escaped from Keris at the feeling of her curves pressing down on her groin. With something that couldn’t have been innocence, but did a remarkably good mimicry of it, Ney tapped the dildo against her lips thoughtfully. “Now, what am I doing to do with this? I should probably throw it away. I mean, who knows where it’s been before it wound up behind your ear?”

“This isn’t funny,” Keris whined. She tried to cover her face with her hands, only to find that like the _utter asshole_ she was, Ney had added some bedsheet ties to her hair and now her hands were trapped. “You… you set this up!”

“Little old me?”

“Yes! You!”

“Ow, Kiss, you wound me, you really do. Such horrible things coming from your mouth.” She leaned in, brushing the black stone phallus against Keris’s lips. “Why don’t you use that mouth for something else, hmm?”

“Is this revenge for me gagging you?” Keris demanded through clenched teeth.

“I’m just thinking you might want to get it nice and wet. Clean it off, you know. Because who knows where it might go next?”

Keris wriggled, feeling vulnerable. “Not the butt,” she said, teeth still clenched. “I don’t really like butt stuff.”

“Kiss, Kiss, Kiss, your body is like a book to me.” Ney leaned back, rubbing Keris’s thigh. “In this case, one spread wide open. Now, are you going to be a good girl and suck on this while I get you ready in other ways, or should I just toss it out the window?”

With an exaggerated pout, Keris stretched her jaw open - and kept doing it past when any human mouth would stop. Rather than do what she had promised, Ney instead leaned in and kissed Keris’s nose. Her lips felt like soft velvet and Keris squeaked happily, rehinging her jaw. In a blink of an eye, Ney had fastened a gag made of Keris’s own hair around the dildo and secured it into her mouth. Her protest at mean cheating use of kisses was muffled by the sudden obstruction - and whatever Keris had been about to say was forgotten in the discovery that Ney had tried this on herself before she produced it from wherever it had been.

Her slitted eyes widened, and she moaned in delight at the taste of another woman in her mouth. White hot light exploded behind her eyes when Ney shifted her attention down to her nipples, pinching one while her mouth attended to the other. And then Ney worked lower, lower, lower, to…

Keris gasped, and winced. 

“Kiss?” Ney pushed up, eyes wide.

Keris clenched her mouth around the dildo in her mouth, making muffled noises. A mouth on her navel opened up. “It… hurts. Too… too…” she gasped. She let go of her lower-soul, her pupils returning to human-roundness. “I… I can’t do it. Not with the snake helping.”

Ney rested her finger on the mouth on her stomach, tracing it closed. “You don’t need to do that to feel better. I’ll just settle with the knowledge that I’m just too good.”

“Gods, fuck you,” Keris’s stomach-mouth growled.

“Shh, shh, you don’t need to say anything, Kiss. After all..” she slipped her fingers back into Keris, “you don’t need more than one mouth.”

“I need more than one mouth to tell you that you’re a… aaaah!” Keris clenched down, thrusting her hips at Ney. “You’re cheating!”

“Isn’t that what you love about me?” Ney grinned, with a kiss to Keris’s forehead. “So your stomach needs to stop grumbling.” She undid the hair ties, extracting the dildo and letting the drool drip down. “Nice and wet, aren’t you?”

“I couldn’t breathe,” Keris tried in a little voice. She ruined her pretence by reaching up to lick the head when Ney lowered it for her.

“Such a shame,” Ney said happily, kissing her on the lips. Keris sank into her warmth, feeling the body-warmed stone traced down her body. The lips brushed her jawline, kissing along it to her ear as the dildo reached her slit. “Now,” Ney murmured into her ears, barely moving her lips. “You’re going to have to ask me for it, you naughty little girl.”

“Oh, come on,” Keris moaned. The fire in her left her wanting, needing more. “Stop playing!”

“That’s what you want to do.” Up and down, up and down. “But you need to ask for it.”

Keris called on coiling blackness, and her hand slipped out of her hair with ease. She grabbed Ney by the waist, pulling them together. Their heaving chests slid against each other as Keris found Ney’s ear. “I don’t need to ask,” she retorted, her fingers sinking to the curve of Ney’s ass to brush against her satisfyingly wet pussy.

“Yes you do. Because if you dish it out, but can’t take it, that means I win.”

The flush of outrage overcame even her desire. “What do you mean you win, asshole?”

“I mean,” and there was Ney’s grin, audible in her softness. “I could have got out any time I wanted. But I let you have your fun. Are you saying I’m just better at this than you?”

Keris worked her mouth helplessly. “You… this…” She relaxed her grip. “That’s dirty!”

“And so are you.” Ney’s brown eyes met hers as she lay on top of her, legs between Keris’s. “Aren’t you?”

With a sharp inhalation, Keris… what did she do? She thought about the place they were in. A dream she’d dreamed just for Ney. Except she hadn’t. She’d wanted to see him again, and had been delighted to see her as a woman. When she’d been with Testolagh, she’d gotten off on pinning him down and doing all sorts of nasty things to him, but there had also been the bit when he snapped at the end and she’d liked it too.

She loved it when it was just her and Sasi, cuddling in bed, and Sasi started to get touchy with her mind-hands and Keris could just… lie back and enjoy the attention.

When she put it like that, she couldn’t help but grin back. “I’m your dirty little girl,” she said, running her free hand up and down Ney’s spine, feeling every little bump. 

“Are you?”

“Oh yes.” She parted her lips, letting that burning need show. “I want you to mess me up.”

Ney kissed her deeply, before sinking back down. Slowly, so slowly she slipped the dildo in, and Keris gasped as it spread her open. She cooed in delight at the feeling of something, finally inside her that was thicker than fingers. Ney’s smile widened as Keris made a happy little sound with each third or fourth thrust, but as she picked up the pace the sounds became moans as she pulled Keris higher and higher towards her peak.

One hand controlled the pace, while the other was at her clit. Ney’s mouth never settled on one place, kissing all over with strangely hesitant kisses that felt like butterflies. They matched the butterflies in Keris’s stomach. Her free hand went to her mouth and she gasped into it, cheeks bright red. Ney was an incredibly talented pickpocket - she knew that very well - but those fingers on her were putting sensations in her she’d rarely felt before. 

“Is it good, Kiss?” Ney asked, breathing deeply. She knelt between Keris’s legs, looking down at her, and the way her damp hair framed her face was somehow incredibly beautiful. Keris couldn’t stop staring at her.

“So good,” Keris gasped.

“Really? A dirty girl like you acting like a blushing maiden?”

“D-don’t… ah! Don’t expect…” The blush was spreading up her brow. “Gods, you’re such… ah! Such an asshole!”

Ney paused, drawing a whine from Keris. “You mean I should st-”

“Nonono I need it! Pleasepleaseplease!”

With a satisfied smirk, Ney lowered her head down between Keris’s knees, and if her fingers were those of a talented pickpocket, her tongue was even quicker. Keris reached out. Rather than interfere with the - wonderful, glorious, radiant - things Ney was doing, she simply ran her fingers through her hair while Ney brought her to the peak of her pleasure.

The wave came crashing down, and Keris raised her voice in a howl. Her limbs turned to jelly, and she sank back, chest heaving. When she gasped for breath, she found Ney’s mouth waiting and she tasted herself on her lover’s lips.

In the warm and fuzzy post-orgasmic haze, Keris lay back on the sweaty silken sheets, while the bed protested as Ney undid all the cunning knots she’d tied in her hair.

“Ow!”

“Oops.” Ney paused, scooping a strand she’d accidentally snagged away from her elbow. “So you had fun.”

“Mmm.” Keris kissed her ankle. “Yeah.”

“You really enjoy my dick, don’t you?” Ney said cheerfully, waving the dildo at Keris before resting it on her abdomen.

Keris glared up at her through hooded eyelids, snatching it up protectively. “You know that already. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t put up with you.”

Ney glanced down in mock horror, running her hands over her female form. “You mean you were just faking it? You’re not into me l-l-like this? I’m hurt, Kiss. Hurt!”

“F-fuck you.”

“Mmm. That _was_ pretty hot. Watching you like that, I mean. I’d be up for another go.”

Keris sighed, but then grinned as a thought came to her. “Well, I mean, I always did want you to go fuck yourself…” she suggested, waving the glistening dildo.

“Uh… no. Sorry, it doesn’t do it for me.” She wrapped her arms around Keris, bringing her to a sitting position and letting her lean against her chest. It was a dirty blow, Keris thought viciously as she snuggled into the bigger girl.

“I’ll think of something,” she threatened, pouting into Ney’s chest. “Something just as poetic.”

“Aww.” Ney’s hands moved up around her, stroking her hair. “Writing me poetry, Kiss? I’m flattered. ‘Fraid I can’t return the favour, though. I’m not much of a poet, and I know it.”

“Your meter was off,” Keris promptly informed her, hearing the grin in her last sentence and refusing to give her the satisfaction. “And everyone from here to Nexus knows that one. Try harder.” She felt Ney’s chuckling more through touch than hearing, and prodded her in the side. “Hush! Poetry is an art form, you can’t expect to mock it an-”

She cut off, not because she ran out of steam, but because Ney had tipped her head back and kissed her. Unlike some of the fierce kisses from earlier, all teeth and tongue and force; this was soft and sweet and done with a smile. Keris blinked at her as Ney pulled back, looking up at a fond smile.

“You really are cute when you get all haughty about your art,” Ney said, tapping her on the nose. “It suits you.”

Keris responded maturely and proportionately by snapping at her finger. “_You’re_ cute when you’re not _talking_,” she grumbled. “Huh. Actually, lie back. I’ve got an idea.”

Pushing Ney back against the bed, Keris planted her hair down and lifted herself, flipping her body around-

“Ow! That was my face!”

“Sorry, sorry.” Patting Ney’s hip in apology, Keris finished turning herself around, taking more care with her legs. She rested her head on Ney’s knee, staring down the curves of her body. “You are a pretty girl, you know that?”

“Of course I do,” Ney said, cheeks darkening with a blush. She pulled at Keris’s legs, sliding her sweat-slick skin along the silk. “That’s better.”

Keris didn’t say much, because the motion had brought her face-first into Ney’s shaven pussy. She inhaled its scent, felt its generous wetness spread across her face and tasted it. “Y’know,” she said, leaning back. “You dream up a good girl,” she said, wiggling her hair against it to hear the little hitches of breath from Ney. “But,” she squeaked when Ney returned the favour, “a-a-anyway, why do you dream that… well, that you shave?”

“Mmmph?”

“I mean, if you wanted to be bald down there, you could… dream you don’t have hair. But you’ve even got some razor rash. It’s…” Keris giggled, “kind of a prosey dream.”

She felt Ney’s chest shift against her stomach as she sighed. “I dunno. What even is this body? Is this a dream of myself, or is it my spirit taking form without flesh?”

“... uh,” Keris said, who hadn’t really worked that out herself. “Good question.” She kissed Ney’s thighs. “Does it matter?”

“Probably not. I guess… I mean, I shave anyway because hair just gets in the way of disguises - and doesn’t feel so icky when I feel girly.” The bed bounced as she shrugged. “Maybe it’s just I can’t dream of having no hair without getting shaving rashes.”

Keris giggled. “Get better dreams. You can avoid rashes in real life. Mind you, I think you’d look cute with some growth there,” she trailed her hair over Ney’s pubic mound, “and there and… and maybe something in henna and gold flakes on your skin?”

“I’ll think about it,” Ney promised. “But decorate me later, Kiss. We doing this or not?”

Keris grinned, “I don’t know. Do you think you have one more in you?”

Ney’s response was to lick long and slow up her slit, startling her into a squeak, and slip two of those clever, curling fingers into her. Keris growled happily, and bent her own head to her task, rolling them over and pushing Ney’s legs apart for better access. The residue of Ney’s earlier bone-shaking orgasm was still smeared across her thighs, and Keris lapped it up with quick licks and nibbles, teasing as she approached her pussy. Instead of resisting the delightful feeling of lips and tongue and fingers at work between her own legs, she relaxed into it and let the pleasure come.

There was something different about this time, she thought dreamily as she lipped at Ney’s clit, enjoying the feeling of an excited girl grinding onto her mouth. No wrestling for control, no games for the moment. Just easy comfortable equals. It was nice.

And it was with that thought in mind that she gently lapped and rubbed at Ney until she got a low moan and a shudder out of her, tilting her head back and biting her lip as her own orgasm broke gently. In the aftermath, she lay there and nuzzled Ney’s vulva for a while, before pulling herself round again to collapse sleepily on top of her. She felt tired, content and sated - more than willing to lie there and bask in the afterglow for as long as possible.

“So if we fall asleep in a… a dream,” Ney yawned, wrapping her arm over Keris, “do we… wake up? Or go to another dream? Or… summin’ else?” 

Keris cut her off by fumbling a clumsy hand over her mouth. “Shush’t,” she ordered drowsily. “No quesh’ns. Pillows should’n be talky.”

“Look, I don’t want to be trapped in an endless dream where all there is to do is you.” Ney considered that. “Oh. Right. Mmm. Not so bad. Let’s give it a go.” She kissed Keris on the nose.

With a giggle, Keris nuzzled back, and slowly drifted off.


	11. Chapter 11

When she woke, she was still in a dream. And in this dream, she was sweaty, her scalp hurt, and she ached in various places. Dark-skinned arms wrapped around her; a woman pressed up against her, holding her tight.

And she was very, very happy.

This was everything she’d been missing since Sasi had to go. Her Gales were just playing with herself, Golden Child was… not like this, and Testolagh was _really_ not like this. Not when she’d been lying on her back for him, and not when she’d been getting those uncomfortable thrills out of hurting him like he wanted.

Ney was here, and she was dozing in her arms, and she felt safe and surrounded and… Keris shivered pleasurably, wriggling around in the muscular hold so she was face to face with her girlfr… boyfri… her Ney. Her Ney.

“Mmm. You’re awake,” Ney murmured. “Mind letting go of me? I sort of can’t move?”

Keris blinked, and realise she’d wrapped Ney up once more in her sleep. “You could get out,” she said back, kissing her throat.

Lips brushed against her forehead. “Yes, but that might have woken you up.”

Keris couldn’t help but beam, her hair sliding out from under them. She pressed her lips to Ney’s, holding them together as she enjoyed her closeness, her warmth, the smell and taste in her mouth of what they’d done together. 

Released, Ney rolled onto her back. Keris admired her form, and the pretty contrast her dark skin made to the scarlet sheets. “So,” Ney said, shifting to wrap an arm around Keris. “You can fall asleep in your own dream? How does that work? Did you dream of anything else?”

Keris blinked. “Yeah, I guess I did. I… don’t actually know. This is the first time I’ve done this.”

“Aww, was I your first?”

Keris viciously nipped Ney’s arm. Because she was still in a good mood, she only used blunt human teeth.

“Ow!”

“Serves you right!” Her cheeks pinkened. This… this wasn’t the first time she’d made love in a dream, though. There had been Adorjan, and there had been the conception of the twins. And… well, regular sex dreams, but they weren’t quite the same.

“Poor me, victimised by a more experienced woman,” Ney said with maudlin self-pity. For all her overblown melancholy, though, her hand was on Keris’s breast, brushing it with a thumb. Keris wriggled up against her, happy soft noises escaping her lips. She hooked a leg over Ney, letting her knee rest on the hot warmth of her pussy - and maybe she shifted a little, just to tease.

“Sorry I… I didn’t feel like being a man,” Ney said, her attention drifting south with Keris’s motions. 

“‘S fine.”

“I… I don’t know why I don’t like having things in me, but I know you do.”

“‘S fine.” Keris nudged her. “Stop being sorry.”

“But I know you wanted…”

“No, I get it,” Keris insisted. “You’re not the first person I’ve known who’s not one or the other. Not even the second or third. Some people feel like one or the other depending on the day, some are both all the time, some kinda don’t feel like either...”

She yawned. “S’not a big thing, is what I’m saying. As long as you’re not selling out to some drug-peddling asshole or abandoning me, why should I have anything to say about what you’re doing or who you feel like? And I like girls more anyway,” Keris admitted, hugging Ney tight. “They taste better. They smell better. They’re softer and prettier. I just also like having a dick in me sometimes. You can be a boy and a girl. You’re perfect.” She paused. “Or at least you would be if you weren’t such an asshole sometimes,” she added with some pique.

“Aww.” Ney’s stroking was getting to her. She… she didn’t usually feel so warm and soft, and things only got more so when she kissed her on the cheek. “So I’ll see you again?”

“Mmm.”

... urgh. But could she really continue this _without_ telling Ney who she really worked for? Because Ney was smart. Ney was brilliant. It was part of what Keris had originally been scared of, and it was part of what made her so... _so_.

Urgh. Keris let her head flop down onto Ney’s breasts, nuzzling them and checking out what the change in body shape had done to her tattoos. Even as exhausted as they both were, she felt the nipples stiffen, and smirked. Nice to see she could still inspire that reaction.

“I’ve been lying to you,” she mumbled into soft skin.

“No, Kiss, you’re lying on me,” Ney said. “Look, you’re using my boobs as a pillow.”

“I know what I said!”

“Yes, Kiss, and what you said is that you were lying on me, because you’re a breast lady. I remember it quite clearly. You confessed that’s what you like most about me. I mean, apart from my charming personality, of course.”

“Oh, shut up,” Keris snapped, prodding her in the side. “I’m trying to be all open and honest and confess to things here.” She gnawed her lip, cuddling further into the warm body beneath her. Ney’s hand came up to stroke her hair and pet the back of her neck. “I... I lied to you back in Malra. Or... or I let you lie to yourself and went along with it when you got the answer wrong.”

“Is this about you being a moon-chosen instead of a sun-chosen, Kiss? Because that was something I worked out at the time. You turned into a silver snake monster when you smashed your way out of Taym’s pyramid - and looking back, you always had those feathers in your hair, and went all white-haired and scary that time on the barge, and turned your hands into roots and things right in front of me.” Ney flashed a grin. “Not that hard to figure out. I bet you were gloating the whole time.”

With great restraint, Keris managed to refrain from snorting. “Not that,” she mumbled, deciding not to correct that misapprehension. “You remember how you decided I wasn’t an infernalist because I hadn’t been worshipping demons or... or summoning things from Hell? I have. I mean, I do. I mean...”

She shook her head and looked up to meet Ney’s gaze. Her lover looked wary, but not actively hostile yet. Waiting to hear her out before making a decision.

“I... I do work for Hell,” she said bluntly. “I’m... it’s coin-hire, like you and Taym. They gave me my powers and rescued me from a... a really bad situation, so I owe them. And also they pay me massive amounts of money and favours to do things for them. To... to attack the Dragonblooded and the Realm, or to gather raksha for them to devour, or to steal rare artifacts they lay claim to for them.” She hesitated nervously. “The... the reason you didn’t see anything in Malra was because that wasn’t a mission. I mean, it was... did you hear about Eshtock? That was me. I did that in return for one of... one of their higher-ups telling me where my home village was, and then took some time off to have my babies.”

Ney’s eyebrows climbed up her face. “So that’s what happened there. He didn’t tell me about that until afterwards. Prob’bly ‘cause,” she grinned, “missions like that cost extra. As a percent, I mean. He didn’t want to let me have my share of whatever I’d have recovered from that place if me and my people had been the ones there.”

Keris sputtered. “Is _that_ what you’re focusing...” She paused, and frowned. “Wait. He’d keep you out of that when you’re the best person?”

“Mercenary, remember? I know he’ll sometimes send people loyal to him rather than his treasury so he can avoid having to share the plunder with me.”

“Huh.” Keris blinked. “Anyway, the only thing I told them about the trip in Malra was that I caused some chaos for a Solar lord and learned more powerful sorcery, and they... didn’t ask anything else. I’m really good at my job, so I get a lot of leeway; they don’t ask many questions about what I do in my downtime and I can sometimes get away with disappearing for a season as long as I come back with... with something I can wave around to prove I wasn’t just wasting it.”

She fell silent, watching nervously as Ney thought. This was the scary part. She’d committed to honesty, bared her secret; left herself open and vulnerable. Now she could do nothing but wait for Ney’s reaction.

Slowly, easily, Ney sat up, shifting Keris’s head to her lap. The warm, dark skin of her thighs was underneath, and long fingers brushed Keris’s hair from her eyes. “I mean, that’s not all you’ve been lying about,” Ney pointed out.

Keris’s heart skipped a beat. “Yes, but that stuff doesn’t matter,” she pointed out, going for shamelessness as her defence.

“You’re also not really moon-chosen,” Ney said, eyes a mystery. “I wanted to see if you’d actually admit it, but you didn’t. I’ve met a few - and more since we parted ways. And,” she smiled, or perhaps bared her teeth. “I noticed when I thought about it you never said anything like ‘Oh, Ney, love of my life, incredibly handsome and pretty person, I was chosen by the Moon’.” She looked down at Keris. “And Kiss, my love, my sweetheart, my literal dream girl, you don’t like lying to people’s faces. Not when you can say vague things and let them fool themselves. Hmm?”

Keris felt her cheeks heat until they were all but burning. The compliments - or perhaps the sincerity - made her want to hug Ney tight and demand to hear more of them. And also, simultaneously, run away and hide behind something so Ney couldn’t see her blushing.

“You were pretending to be fooled,” she muttered, avoiding Ney’s eyes. This resulted in her staring at the general area of Ney’s chest, which didn’t exactly help the blush situation. “Asshole.”

“See,” Ney said, beaming. “There you go again. So I’m just going to take it as confirmation. Now, the question is,” her fingers drifted to Keris’s forehead, sketching a circle on her brow, around and around again like she was trying to coax it out, “what are you? See, now, I have some speculation there. But maybe you don’t want to hear it from me.” The lulling feeling of her fingers against her brow was almost hypnotic. “So what do you want, Kiss?”

Keris bit her lip, glancing up through her eyelashes at Ney and shifting on top of her. She was dimly aware of her hair knotting and twisting nervously - which meant Ney was aware of it too, urgh.

“Does it matter?” she asked in a whisper almost too low to hear. “What I am, whether I’m a moon or a sun or whatever? I... it’s one of the things I’m _not meant to talk about_.” She squirmed uncomfortably. “And it doesn’t... what I am isn’t the point. What you are doesn’t matter to how you’re working for the naib.”

She shrank a little, half rolling off Ney before a toned arm caught her and stopped her going the rest of the way. Keris looked away again rather than focus on Ney’s expression. “You’re focusing on what I am,” she mumbled. “But you haven’t said anything about who I work for. You said you were watching me for Hell-worship in Malra - you said you decided to trust me because you didn’t see any signs of it! Well I do work for them! Don’t you care, now? What changed?”

Ney worked around her, hands under her armpits as she lifted her up to sit on her lap. She was warm and soft against Keris’s back, resting her chin on Keris’s shoulder. Her arms wrapped around Keris, enveloping her. “I think the real question is what you would do for them,” she whispered into Keris’s ear. “Because the mountain lords and the lowlanders sometimes forget what us highlanders do, and how we work.

“And the thing about you, Kiss? I’ve watched you. Seen how you work. Thought about the way you phrase things - and maybe checked up on your father once or twice.” She chuckled. “And the thing is, Kiss, the real thing is? You’d betray your masters in a heartbeat for your clan.” Her fingers slipped lower, walking down to Keris’s navel - and then even further, resting at her entrance. “You’re kinder than you like to let on. You’re greedy, yes - anyone could tell that from what you stole and stole and stole from Taym - but you love pretty things as much as you love money. That was one of the first things you ever told me, remember? How much you loved making beauty for its own sake.

“And,” she shifted, wrapping her legs around Keris’s midsection as she teased her with her fingers, “more than that, you want to be loved. By someone who accepts that you’re a greedy, swaggering, thieving highlander who lies all the time and ties herself up in knots worrying about her children and who’s been treated real badly by life.”

The blush was back, even hotter than before. Keris leaned back into Ney’s warm embrace, eyes fluttering shut. The world rippled around them, the black-and-white-and-red Nexus falling from the inverted ground like rain. Around them, the chamber bled away and reformed itself - a white cloud for a mattress under a black sky speckled with Calesco’s loving constellations. Warm winds ruffled their hair and a thousand ribbons linked the cloud-platforms around them; half of them red and white, the other half black and gold. Upon them, a thousand strong choir of faceless ribbon-figures sang soft songs of love and adoration from eyeless, half-masked faces - but the pair at the centre of it all were so wrapped up in each other as to barely register them.

“So, really,” Ney concluded, nuzzling up against Keris’s neck. “You can work for coin-hire for Hell. But I know you won’t be loyal to them, because if you really thought they were clan, you know I’d hate you.” She paused. “Calesco, too. That girl says a lot about you, and remember - we went on a trip together. I got exposed to her opinions. Sharply.”

“Mmm,” Keris purred, nuzzling backward in turn. “Did she threaten you terribly if you hurt me?”

“She said she’d consider whether you deserved it before doing anything.”

“Heh. Of course she did.”

Keris twisted around to nuzzle Ney’s cheek properly, and pressed a soft, slow kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Thank you,” she murmured. The tension, guilt and anxiety that had pushed her to confess were gone. She felt light and happy and brave. She felt free. “Thank you for understanding.”

She paused. Ney waited, sensing there was something more as Keris took a breath and examined her feelings. It was funny. She’d expected a little hesitation. But riding this high of contentedness and courage, feeling so cherished... there was none.

“I love you too,” she whispered, closing her eyes and pressing her forehead to Ney’s. “I love you, Ney.”

She felt Ney smile. “I know.”


	12. Chapter 12

The pre-dawn light painted the mountain sky a deep blue. Venus hung in the sky above the horizon, brightest of the stars visible just before the sun rose. The dawn chorus sung out, joined by strange lyrical beasts twisted by the chaos-tide scared of the sun.

Keris opened her eyes. She lay in the leafmould at the foot of the tree. Her skin felt… strange. Gritty. Ill-fitting. Like she was putting it on again and it needed time to stretch to fit her. She picked herself up, and stretched. Her dress slithered down to her ankles. It was completely shredded and more like ribbons than a single garment, like someone had gone after it with knives.

“Fuck,” Keris muttered, but it wasn’t too annoyed. She was feeling too good to really be pissed off - and frankly, she was used to new powers wrecking her clothing. Especially when they were gifts from the Silent Wind.

Licking her finger, she drew a line down the air, splitting it open. Faint music drifted out. “Dulmea! New dress!” she called into the hole in the world, tossing her old tatters in.

“Oh, Keris,” Sirelmiya’s warm voice said, very close to the hole. “Such a wonderful thing you did.”

“I… what?” A white gown and a red underrobe emerged from the hole, falling into Keris’s surprised hands. It had a certain… bridal cut. “Sirelmiya, what are you…”

“Oh, the temple of your love has grown to encompass this. The statues of the two-faced Jackal are there, showing your adoration of your new beloved.” The demoness made a happy squeal. “This is wonderful! I knew you two would realise your feelings for each other and bring love and joy to one another!”

“What?” The words dragged themselves from Keris’s lips, cheeks bright red. “I don’t adore him! He’s not my beloved! He’s a jerk! And so is she! They’re a… they’re just someone I…” She fumbled at the clothes Sirelmiya had provided, the sheer silk slick against her skin.

“I guard your loves, and you love Ney Adami,” Sirelmiya said, as smug as the wretched oversized housecat that she was. “You love him and you will teach him and you will hurt him, because that is love. I knew this was going to happen, and everything went as planned.”

“La la la, not listening!” Stupid know-it-all love souls thinking they could tell her who she loved! Just… just because she said it to Ney, didn’t mean she wanted it shouted from the treetops! It was… it was secret! And personal! Not something for a shameless cat to brag about! “Shoo! Shoo!”

Sirelmiya’s presence departed, and Keris let out a sigh of relief. She finished dressing, unused to the cut of the clothes her soul had provided. They were very long and flowing and… no, no, she didn’t like this. It looked too much like something the brides in Nexus wore. In red and white rather than blue, but Eko would recognise it on sight - and if she didn’t, Calesco would.

Unwanted and unasked for, the image of a giant elaborate wedding for her and Ney came to mind; her in these robes, Ney in a matching pair, her family there and Lilunu officiating and...

Despite herself, Keris giggled. She was so silly! That would never happen, even… even if she sort of maybe wanted it. Urgh! She’d fallen for such an infuriating, sexy, wonderful, kind, annoying man and then found Ney was all those things when she was a woman, too. 

Bouncing up and down on her toes, Keris tore off the sleeves to make it look less bridal, and then worked out the kinks in her neck. Well, what to do now? As opposed to in a few days time, when she was going to make a dream for Sasi and rock her girlfriend’s world. But that came later. As she was planning to make Sasi do. Repeatedly.

She was going to take Rathan back to the mansion, give him a few weeks of doting away from the others, and make sure he learned some spells. And she could pull out her research notes and see if she could learn how to summon more demons en masse to help secure this area. She would let Haneyl sulk - served her right for being such a brat! She wasn’t going to let her greedy side ruin this! 

Yes. Yes. A good plan. She’d not have to talk to Haneyl, give her a chance to cool down, and they wouldn’t have to have any arguments if Keris wasn’t here. Which she really didn’t want to do. She hated being angry at her daughter, especially if she was in a good mood now, so if she just took… her and Rathan away from here, Haneyl would have a chance to cool off. She could spend it with Kuha, and Keris wouldn’t have to hear it.

And... maybe she could sketch up some more dream-world ideas for Ney, too. After all, her trial _this_ time might not have worked - but that was no reason to stop making sure Ney appreciated her visits. If he wasn’t willing to go to the effort of finding Keris in each dream, he clearly didn’t deserve to see her.

... and the fact it would let her mob him with Gales and attack him with the environment and maybe punch his stupid sexy smirk off his face semi-regularly was a nice bonus, too.

Yes, Keris decided with a smile. Life was starting to look up.


	13. Chapter 13

On the other side of the world…

“Oi! Old man! Get up!” A little foot went to nudge Ney in the ribs.

Eyes still closed, Ney grabbed the foot. “I’m up,” she said, not opening her eyes.

“Um! Excuse me! No, you’re not! If you were up, you’d be up! But you’re flat on your back with your eyes closed!”

“La, la, Ahkmi, can’t we have one morning without you shouting at me?” Ney yawned. “You were much nicer when you were made of tar. Now you’re all mean.”

“Well, I’m not anymore!” Petal-covered fingers pulled Ney’s eyelids open. She sighed, and blearly gazed up at the deep indigo flower-demon with golden-burning eyes within its bud-head. “That means you need to wake up! You told me that you wanted to be woken up before dawn so you could say you were catching the glider back to the frontier!”

“I know!” Ney sat up, nightshirt falling loose around her. Her head span. She didn’t quite feel the right shape. Her hands went to her chest, and then she remembered; oh yes, she was awake in her normal form. Yuck. “I was having such a nice dream…”

“Oh?” That was enough to get Ahkmi whirling to grab paper and ink. “What was it? Maybe it means something?”

Ney grinned, pulling herself upright to look down at the child-sized demon. “I know exactly what it meant, and I’ll tell you what happened when you’re older.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s mystery training,” Ney said blandly. “Now, shoo! You can make me my breakfast.”

The szirom puffed out their cheeks. “I’m going to put so many delicious hot things in it, you won’t believe it,” they muttered under their breath.

“Good idea, my student,” Ney advised, “but saying it where I can hear it ruins the element of surprise. You need to work on your pranks.”

She let the demon go, mumbling, then rolled off her luxurious bed and strode across the soft carpets to the window. The shining white and gold of Malra’s capital stretched out before her, all the way to Taym’s grand palace. A city he had built; a city that Ney now knew was the lesser of that city that Kiss had dreamed up for her.

Well, that was one way to make a girl feel special.

Ney’s mind worked away as she washed her face, shaved, and got dressed in loose, figure-hiding clothing. Kiss could get into her dreams. From what Ney knew of her, she’d use them… well, when she was bored, horny, or needed emotional closeness. Would there be any warning? She didn’t know. Could she trap her in a dream or stop her waking up? Also unknown. Something to watch for, she guessed.

But on the plus side, she had a very pretty girlfriend who was working for Hell for coin-hire. So Kiss had her flaws. Who didn’t? She’d just keep this away from Taym and Mashy and all those annoying preachy people who didn’t understand that in the night, things weren’t so clear.

Ney smiled. Might be a good idea to keep an eye on Malek Qaja, though. Kiss could probably reach into her dreams too - and if she wanted to poach her from Taym, she’d start moving her assets away from Malra. 

As for whether she’d actually tell Taym if she saw that? Well. That’d all depend on how much it was worth to him. And whether he kept on getting on her nerves about things that didn’t matter.

Taym would never understand that. But Kiss would. She was a highlander by blood, too. An untrustworthy, greedy, neurotic and sentimental mess of a girl who was a literal and figurative demon in the bedroom. And Ney was increasingly fond of her. 

Ney Adami, the Jackal of Malra, went off to face the day ahead with a wide smile on her lips.


End file.
